The Bloomsbury Handbook of World Theory 9781501361944, 9781501361975, 9781501361968

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: World Theory in the New Millennium Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Christian Moraru
Part One Arts and Humanities
1 Worlding History Fabio López Lázaro
2 Worlding Philosophy Brian O’Keeffe
3 Worlding Ethics Nigel Dower
4 Worlding Art Nikos Papastergiadis
5 Worlding Postmodernism Hans Bertens
6 Worlding Comparative Literature Christian Moraru
7 Worlding Popular Culture Esther Peeren
8 Worlding Music John Mowitt
9 Worlding Cinema Alex Taek-Gwang Lee
10 Worlding Theater Gina Masucci MacKenzie
11 Worlding Religion Gerda Heck and Stephan Lanz
Part Two Social and Behavioral Sciences
12 Worlding Sociology Veronika Wittmann
13 Worlding Anthropology Nigel Rapport
14 Worlding Economics Peter Hitchcock
15 Worlding Psychoanalysis Dany Nobus
16 Worlding Women Robin Truth Goodman
17 Worlding Gender Vrushali Patil
18 Worlding Queer Sri Craven
19 Worlding Identity Zahi Zalloua
Part Two Social and Behavioral Sciences
20 Worlding Higher Education Michael Thomas
21 Worlding Public Policy Kenneth J. Saltman
22 Worlding International Education Lien Pham
23 Worlding International Relations Sophia A. McClennen
24 Worlding Media Studies Toby Miller and Jesús Arroyave
25 Worlding Journalism Vera Slavtcheva-Petkova
26 Worlding Publishing Jeffrey R. Di Leo
27 Worlding Architecture Richard Ingersoll
Part Four Natural and Formal Sciences
28 Worlding Logic Paul M. Livingston
29 Worlding Spatiality Studies Robert T. Tally Jr.
30 Worlding Cybernetics Andrew Culp
31 Worlding Systems Theory Bruce Clarke
32 Worlding Biology Adam Nocek
33 Worlding Environmental Studies Robert P. Marzec
34 Worlding Earth and Climate Studies
Index

Citation preview

THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK OF WORLD THEORY

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THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK OF

WORLD THEORY Edited by Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Christian Moraru

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2022 Copyright © Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Christian Moraru, 2022 Each chapter copyright © by the contributor, 2022 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on pp. viii–ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Namkwan Cho Photograph © Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-6194-4 ePDF: 978-1-5013-6196-8 eBook: 978-1-5013-6195-1 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

P reface and A cknowledgments  N otes on C ontributors  Introduction: World Theory in the New Millennium Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Christian Moraru

viii x 1

Part One  Arts and Humanities 1 Worlding History Fabio López Lázaro

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2 Worlding Philosophy Brian O’Keeffe

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3 Worlding Ethics Nigel Dower

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4 Worlding Art Nikos Papastergiadis

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5 Worlding Postmodernism Hans Bertens

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6 Worlding Comparative Literature Christian Moraru

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7 Worlding Popular Culture Esther Peeren

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8 Worlding Music John Mowitt

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9 Worlding Cinema Alex Taek-Gwang Lee

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CONTENTS

10 Worlding Theater Gina Masucci MacKenzie

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11 Worlding Religion Gerda Heck and Stephan Lanz

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Part Two  Social and Behavioral Sciences 12 Worlding Sociology Veronika Wittmann

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13 Worlding Anthropology Nigel Rapport

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14 Worlding Economics Peter Hitchcock

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15 Worlding Psychoanalysis Dany Nobus

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16 Worlding Women Robin Truth Goodman

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17 Worlding Gender Vrushali Patil

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18 Worlding Queer Sri Craven

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19 Worlding Identity Zahi Zalloua

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Part Three  The Professions 20 Worlding Higher Education Michael Thomas

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21 Worlding Public Policy Kenneth J. Saltman

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22 Worlding International Education Lien Pham

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23 Worlding International Relations Sophia A. McClennen

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24 Worlding Media Studies Toby Miller and Jesús Arroyave

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CONTENTS

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25 Worlding Journalism Vera Slavtcheva-Petkova

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26 Worlding Publishing Jeffrey R. Di Leo

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27 Worlding Architecture Richard Ingersoll

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Part Four  Natural and Formal Sciences 28 Worlding Logic Paul M. Livingston

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29 Worlding Spatiality Studies Robert T. Tally Jr.

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30 Worlding Cybernetics Andrew Culp

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31 Worlding Systems Theory Bruce Clarke

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32 Worlding Biology Adam Nocek

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33 Worlding Environmental Studies Robert P. Marzec

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34 Worlding Earth and Climate Studies Claire Colebrook

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I ndex 

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PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As American novelist Don DeLillo writes and variously suggests in his later books, the world is a “world of others.” Our Handbook is a moment in the more systematic grappling with this otherness on a range of scales and from a whole spectrum of disciplinary angles. For a long time, such efforts played out chiefly within the sphere of human culture. Of late, more and more of us have decided, however, that the previous sentence’s closing phrase is not necessarily redundant. Whether in parallel or in conversation with this insight, discussions of “world,” “worldliness,” and “worldedness” have broken through the human ceiling to canvas the “other” side of anthropocentric and even animate knowledge and, pace Martin Heidegger, to try to wrap one’s brain around what it means to have a world, be in the world, or be of it if you are a rock, a fly, or any other kind of existent. “Worlds theory,” then? Or, to play it safe—at least as far as certain philosophers are concerned—“world theory,” singular? Even so, and with another popular idiom, this putative one-world world is a “world of other worlds,” as some of our contributors imply or argue explicitly. Be that as it may, it turned out that the coeditors’ immediate, private world of reading, thinking, and writing was not enough to put this book together. They also needed, and have received, help from colleagues, friends, contributors, editors, and still others without whom neither the broader world nor the Handbook would be what it is. Thus, Jeffrey R. Di Leo would like to acknowledge the contributors to this book he has come to know and admire through his work as editor of symplokē and executive director of the Society for Critical Exchange and its Winter Theory Institute, specifically Bruce Clark, Claire Colebrook, Andrew Culp, Robin Goodman, Peter Hitchcock, Gina Masucci MacKenzie, Robert P. Marzec, Sophia A. McClennen, John Mowitt, Brian O’Keeffe, Esther Peeren, Kenneth J. Saltman, Alex Taek-Gwang Lee, Robert T. Tally Jr., and Zahi Zalloua. He would also like to thank all of those who have contributed to this book, and whom he has come to know through their work on this Handbook. The experience of getting to know so many distinguished scholars and practitioners of theory from around the world primarily through correspondence has been a rewarding and special experience for him. He thanks all contributors for sharing their insights and for working within the time and space constraints of this book—which for many was not an easy thing given the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic. He is also grateful to Keri Ruiz for her assistance in the production of this book, and to Vikki Fitzpatrick for her administrative support, especially in securing materials used for the development of this book. Finally, as always, he would like to thank his wife Nina, for her unfailing encouragement, support, and patience. In addition, Christian Moraru would like to convey his gratitude to the following institutions and individuals for providing funding, guidance, and other forms of assistance benefiting his work on the Handbook: University of North Carolina, Greensboro’s Chancellor Franklin

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D. Gilliam, Jr., for his support of advanced research; also at UNCG, Office of Research and Economic Development and Vice Chancellor, Dr. Terri L. Shelton; the Class of 1949 Distinguished Professor in the Humanities Endowment; the College of Arts and Sciences for a 2021 research leave awarded by Dean John Z. Kiss; the Atlantic World Research Network and its Director, Professor Christopher Hodgkins; the International Programs Center and its Associate Provost for International Programs, Dr. Maria Anastasiou; the Walter Clinton Jackson Library staff; the English Department’s Head, Professor Scott Romine, for his unparalleled leadership. Also, Beth Miller has helped with editing and has done the index. Gratefully acknowledged are the support, kindness, and friendship of Henry Sussman, Bertrand Westphal, Zahi Zalloua, Nicole Simek, Keith Cushman, Karen Kilcup, Stephen Yarbrough, Jean-Michel Rabaté, and Radu Ţurcanu. As usual, Camelia has gone out of her way to do her essential part, day in and day out. We also want to thank, at Bloomsbury, Editorial Director Haaris Naqvi, whose support has been substantial and unflagging. Editorial Assistants Amy Martin and Rachel Moore have been very effective and uniquely responsive. We would like to recognize our colleagues from marketing and production also, as well as the Press’s anonymous evaluators. Finally, we should note that Bertrand Westphal has kindly allowed us to use an excerpt from a 2020 interview as an epigraph to Chapter 6, “Worlding Comparative Literature.” The fragment came out in “‘Literature Helps Worlding the World’: A Conversation with Bertrand Westphal,” interview by Marius Conkan and Emanuel Modoc, in Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory 6.1 (2020), https://doi.org/10.24193/mjcst.2020.9.02.

CONTRIBUTORS

Jesús Arroyave is Professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at Universidad del Norte. His professional interests focus on journalism and media studies, health communication, and communication for development and social change. His research has been published in journals such as Chasqui, Diálogos de la Comunicación, Palabra Clave, Signo y Pensamiento, International Journal of Communication, Journalism, Journalism Studies, and Feminist Media Studies. He has held positions as a visiting scholar in Spain, Germany, the UK, and the United States. He was recently awarded an Alexander von Humboldt grant and is doing a postdoctoral research at Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich, Germany. Hans Bertens is Emeritus Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, and Past President (2013–16) of the International Comparative Literature Association. He publishes in Dutch and in English, and his main interests are in American literature, postmodernism, and literary theory. His English-language books include The Idea of the Postmodern: A History (1995), Contemporary American Crime Fiction (2001, with Theo D’haen), Literary Theory: The Basics (2013, revised edition), and American Literature: A History (2013, again with Theo D’haen). Most recently, he has contributed chapters to Dutch Literature as World Literature (2019), The Cambridge Handbook of Literary Authorship (2019), and The Cambridge Companion to British Postmodernism (forthcoming), and articles to Oxford Bibliographies (2019, 2020). Bruce Clarke is Paul Whitfield Horn Distinguished Professor of Literature and Science in the Department of English at Texas Tech University and the 2019 Baruch S. Blumberg NASA Chair in Astrobiology at the Library of Congress. His research focuses on systems theory, narrative theory, and Gaia theory. His books include Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene (2020), Neocybernetics and Narrative (2014), and Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems (2008). His edited volumes include Posthuman Biopolitics: The Science Fiction of Joan Slonczewski (2020); The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman, with Manuela Rossini (2017); and Earth, Life, and System: Evolution and Ecology on a Gaian Planet (2015). Claire Colebrook is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English, Philosophy, and Women’s and Gender Studies at Penn State University. She has written books and articles on contemporary European philosophy, literary history, gender studies, queer theory, visual culture, and feminist philosophy. Her most recent book is Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols (2016, coauthored with Tom Cohen and J. Hillis Miller). Sri Craven is Associate Professor in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Portland State University in Oregon. Her research and teaching deploy the transnational as a theoretical and critical lens for the study of gender and sexuality. In

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her work, the transnational provides an opportunity to read the production of gender and sexual identities and ideologies historically and locates these within the broader production of racial “difference” that colonialism induces. Select venues for her creative and scholarly publications include Feminist Teacher, Transformations: Journal of Inclusive Pedagogy, Frontiers, Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, and the Routledge Handbook of Asian Diaspora and Development. Andrew Culp is Professor of Media History and Theory at the California Institute of the Arts in the MA Aesthetics and Politics program and the School of Critical Studies. His book Dark Deleuze (2016) proposes a revolutionary new interpretation of Gilles Deleuze for today’s digital world of compulsory happiness, overexposure, and decentralization, and it has been translated into more than a half-dozen languages. His most recent writing has appeared in Flugschriften, La Deleuziana, Stasis, and Alienocene: Journal of the First Outernational. Jeffrey R. Di Leo is Professor of English and Philosophy at the University of HoustonVictoria. He is founder and editor of symplokē and Executive Director of the Society for Critical Exchange and its Winter Theory Institute. His recent books include Dead Theory: Death, Derrida, and the Afterlife of Theory (2016); Higher Education under Late Capitalism: Identity, Conduct, and the Neoliberal Condition (2017); American Literature as World Literature (2017); Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory (2019); The End of American Literature: Essays from the Late Age of Print (2019); Biotheory: Life and Death under Capitalism (2020, with Peter Hitchcock); Philosophy as World Literature (2020); What’s Wrong with Antitheory? (2020); Vinyl Theory (2020); and Catastrophe and Education: Neoliberalism, Theory, and the Future of the Humanities (2020). Nigel Dower is Senior Lecturer Emeritus in Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen Scotland, where he taught until 2004, except for three years teaching philosophy in Zimbabwe (1983– 86). In June 2004, he took early retirement to pursue his interests in “exploring ethics in a globalized world” and to work more in the voluntary sector (e.g., Aberdeen for a Fairer World and the Food Ethics Council). His main research interests are in the ethics/philosophy of development, environment, and global/international relations. He published World Ethics: The New Agenda (1998, 2007) and An Introduction to Global Citizenship (2003). He expressed his interest in development ethics through the International Development Ethics Association (IDEA), of which he was President (2002–06). In 2009, he published a book entitled The Ethics of War and Peace. Robin Truth Goodman is Professor of English at Florida State University. Her published works include Understanding Adorno, Understanding Modernism (2020, edited collection); The Bloomsbury Handbook of 21st Century Feminist Theory (2019, edited collection); Promissory Notes: On the Literary Conditions of Debt (2018); Gender for the Warfare State: Literature of Women in Combat (2016); Literature and the Development of Feminist Theory (2015, edited collection); Gender Work: Feminism after Neoliberalism (2013); Feminist Theory in Pursuit of the Public: Women and the “Re-Privatization” of Labor (2010); Policing Narratives and the State of Terror (2009); World, Class, Women: Global Literature, Education, and Feminism (2004); Strange Love, or How We Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Market (2002, cowritten with Kenneth J. Saltman); and Infertilities: Exploring Fictions of Barren Bodies (2001).

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Gerda Heck has a shared position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, Egyptology, and Anthropology and the Center for Migration and Refugee Studies (CMRS) at the American University in Cairo. Her academic work and research focus on migration and border regimes, urban studies, transnational migration, migrant networks and self-organizing, religion, and new concepts of citizenship. She has conducted research in Germany, Brazil, China, Democratic Republic of Congo, France, Morocco, Turkey, and the United States. Apart from her own projects, she has participated in various international research projects. From 2010 to 2013, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the international and interdisciplinary research project Global Prayers—Redemption and Liberation in the City. In 2016, she conducted research in Turkey within the scope of the international project Transit Migration 2: A Research Project on the De- and Re-Stabilizations of the European Border Regime. Peter Hitchcock is Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center and Baruch College of the City University of New York. He is also on the faculty of Women’s Studies and Film Studies at the Graduate Center. He is the associate director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the Graduate Center. His books include Dialogics of the Oppressed (1992); Oscillate Wildly: Space, Body, and Spirit of Millennial Materialism (1999); Imaginary States: Studies in Cultural Transnationalism (2003); The Long Space: Transnationalism and Postcolonial Form (2009); The New Public Intellectual: Politics, Theory, and the Public Sphere (2016, coedited with Jeffrey R. Di Leo); Labor in Culture, or, Worker of the World(s) (2017); The Debt Age (2018, coedited with Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Sophia A. McClennen); and, most recently, Biotheory: Life and Death under Capitalism (2020, coedited with Jeffrey R. Di Leo). His next project is called “The World, the State, and Postcoloniality.” Richard Ingersoll† taught at Syracuse University in Florence, Italy, and the Politecnico in  Milan. From 1983 to 1998, he was the editor-in-chief of Design Book Review, and he continued to write for numerous periodicals including Architectura Viva, Lotus, Domus, Bauwelt, and C3 Korean Architects. Among his publications are World Architecture, a CrossCultural History (2013/2019); Sprawltown, Looking for the City on Its Edge (2006); and World Architecture, 1900-2000. A Critical Mosaic, Volume 1: Canada and the United States (2000). He was a tenured associate Professor at Rice University from 1986 to 1996 and taught courses in architectural history, urban history, and sustainable urbanism at UC Berkeley, ETH (Zurich), Facoltà di Architettura di Ferrara, Universidad de Navarra (Pamplona), and Peking University. He was the founder of the Association Earth Service, which produces the Terra Viva Workshops. Stephan Lanz is an urbanist and a senior lecturer in Cultural Studies at Europa-Universität Viadrina in Frankfurt, Germany. His main research interests are urban governance, urban cultures, migration, and urban development. In the last years, he conducted research in Berlin, Rio de Janeiro, and Istanbul. His books include Global Prayers: Contemporary Manifestations of the Religious in the City (2014, coedited); Caracas, Socializing City: The “Bolivarian” Metropolis between Self-organization and Control (2013, coedited); Transnationalism and Urbanism (2012, coedited); Faith Is the Place; The Urban Cultures of Global Prayers (2012, coedited); Urban Prayers: New Religious Movements in the Global City (2011, coedited); Funk the City: Sounds and Urban Action from the Peripheries of Rio de Janeiro and Berlin (2009, coedited); Berlin Mixed Up: Occidental-Multicultural-Cosmopolitan? The Political Construction of an Immigration City (2007); Metropolises (2001, with Jochen Becker); The

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City as Prey (1999, with Klaus Ronneberger and Walther Jahn); and Democratic Urban Planning in Postmodernism (1996). Paul M. Livingston is Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico. His books  include The Logic of Being: Realism, Truth, and Time (2017); Beyond the AnalyticContinental Divide: Pluralist Philosophy in the Twenty-First Century (2015, coedited with Jeffrey Bell and Andrew Cutrofello); The Problems of Contemporary Philosophy: A Critical Guide for the Unaffiliated (2015, coauthored with Andrew Cutrofello); The Politics of Logic: Badiou, Wittgenstein, and the Consequences of Formalism (2012); Philosophy and the Vision of Language (2008); and Philosophical History and the Problem of Consciousness (2004). Fabio López Lázaro has an MA in Middle Eastern and Islamic history (which won Canada’s Governor General’s gold medal) and a PhD in medieval and early modern European and Latin American history. He has taught at Stanford, Arizona State, Calgary, and Santa Clara universities and has received teaching and research awards at the latter two universities. Since 2013, he has been the director of the Center for Research in World History at the University of Hawaii. He served as the editor-in-chief of the Journal of World History from 2013 until 2019 and is currently coeditor of an international multivolume series on the history of exploration. López Lázaro’s research publications focus on legal, political, and maritime world history between 1300 and 1700. Gina Masucci MacKenzie is Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences and Associate Professor of English at Holy Family University. Her books, Theatre of the Real: Yeats, Beckett, and Sondheim (2008) and Maternal Representations in Twenty-First-Century Broadway Musicals: Stage Mothers (2019), explore the relationships between drama, musical theater, psychoanalysis, and feminism. She is an associate editor of American Book Review and an advisory editor for The Journal of Modern Literature. Robert P. Marzec is Professor of Environmental and Postcolonial Studies in the Department of English at Purdue University and Associate Editor of MFS Modern Fiction Studies. He is the author of Militarizing the Environment: Climate Change and the Security Society (2015) and An Ecological and Postcolonial Study of Literature (2007). He is affiliated with the Purdue Climate Change Research Center and Purdue’s Center for the Environment and has published articles in boundary 2, Radical History Review, Public Culture, Postmodern Culture, and Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene. Sophia A. McClennen is Professor of International Affairs and Comparative Literature at Penn State University and founding director of the Center for Global Studies. She has published twelve books including Pranksters vs. Autocrats: Why Dilemma Actions Advance Nonviolent Activism (2020, with Srdja Popovic) and Globalization and Latin American Cinema (2018). Toby Miller is Stuart Hall Professor of Cultural Studies, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana—Cuajimalpa and Sir Walter Murdoch Distinguished Collaborator, Murdoch University. He is author and editor of over forty books and his work has been translated into Spanish, Chinese, Portuguese, Japanese, Turkish, German, Italian, Farsi, and Swedish. His most recent volumes are Violence (2021), The Persistence of Violence (2020), How Green Is Your Smartphone? (2020, coauthored), El trabajo cultural (2018), Greenwashing Culture

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(2018), Greenwashing Sport (2018), The Routledge Companion to Global Cultural Policy (2018, coedited), and Global Media Studies (2015, coauthored). A Covid Charter, A Better Future is in press. Miller is Past President of the Cultural Studies Association (USA). Christian Moraru is Class of 1949 Distinguished Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English at University of North Carolina, Greensboro. He specializes in contemporary American fiction, critical theory, as well as comparative literature with emphasis on postmodernism and the relations between globalism and culture. His recent publications include the monographs Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary (2011) and Reading for the Planet: Toward a Geomethodology (2015) and the coedited collections The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century (2015) and Francophone Literature as World Literature (2020). John Mowitt holds the Leadership Chair in the Critical Humanities at the University of Leeds. Mowitt taught in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cites from 1985 until 2013 and has published numerous books and articles on the broad areas of theory, culture, and politics. His most recent books include Radio: Essays in Bad Reception (2011), Sounds: The Ambient Humanities (2015), Tracks from the Crypt (2019), and Offering Theory: Reading in Sociography (2020). He also serves as a senior coeditor of the academic journal Cultural Critique. Dany Nobus is Professor of Psychoanalytic Psychology at Brunel University London, Founding Scholar of the British Psychoanalytic Council, and former Chair and Fellow of the Freud Museum London. He has published numerous books and papers on the history, theory, and practice of psychoanalysis, most recently The Law of Desire: On Lacan’s “Kant with Sade” (2017) and Thresholds and Pathways between Jung and Lacan: On the Blazing Sublime (2020, coedited with Ann Casement and Phil Goss). In 2017, he was the recipient of the Sarton Medal of the University of Ghent for his outstanding contributions to the history of psychoanalysis. Adam Nocek is Assistant Professor in the philosophy of technology and science and technology studies in the School of Arts, Media, and Engineering at Arizona State University. He is also the founding director of ASU’s Center for Philosophical Technologies. Nocek has published widely on the philosophy of media and science; speculative philosophy (especially Whitehead); design philosophy, history, and practice; and critical and speculative theories of computational media. His monograph Molecular Capture: The Animation of Biology is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press. Nocek is the coeditor of The Lure of Whitehead (2014), along with several other book collections and special issues addressing speculative philosophy, technoscience, and design. He is a visiting researcher at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam and previously held the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Visiting Professorship. Brian O’Keeffe is Senior Lecturer in the French department at Barnard College and an associate director of the Barnard Center for Translation Studies. Nikos Papastergiadis is the director of the Research Unit in Public Cultures, based at the University of Melbourne. He is Professor in the School of Culture and Communication at

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the University of Melbourne and founder—with Scott McQuire—of the Spatial Aesthetics research cluster. Throughout his career, Nikos has provided strategic consultancies for government agencies on issues relating to cultural identity and has worked in collaborative projects with artists and theorists of international repute such as John Berger, Jimmie Durham, and Sonya Boyce. His long involvement with the groundbreaking international journal Third Text, as both coeditor and author, was a formative experience in the development of an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural research model, which continues to inform his research practice. His publications include Modernity as Exile (1993); Dialogues in the Diaspora (1998); The Turbulence of Migration (2000); Metaphor and Tension (2004); Spatial Aesthetics: Art, Place, and the Everyday (2006); Cosmopolitanism and Culture (2012); On Art and Friendship (2020); and Museums of the Commons (2020). Vrushali Patil is Associate Professor of Sociology at Florida International University. She researches and teaches at the intersection of gender and sexuality studies, anti-racist work on slavery, colonialism and empire, and historical sociology. Her book titled Empire and the Social Construction of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality: From Societies to Webbed Connectivities is scheduled to be released in 2022. She has published in such journals as Signs, Sociological Theory, Racial and Ethnic Studies, Sex Roles, Journal of Historical Sociology, Theory and Society, Tourism Geographies, and Annals of Tourism Research. Her previous book is Negotiating Decolonization in the United Nations: Politics of Space, Identity, and International Community (2007). Esther Peeren is Professor of Cultural Analysis at the University Amsterdam and Academic Director of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA). She directs the European Research Council-funded project “Imagining the Rural in a Globalizing World” (2018–23), which focuses on imaginations of the rural in popular culture in the United States, the UK, the Netherlands, China, and South Africa. Her publications include the monographs Intersubjectivities and Popular Culture: Bakhtin and Beyond (2008) and The Spectral Metaphor: Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invisibility (2014) and the edited volumes Peripheral Visions in the Globalizing Present: Space, Mobility, Aesthetics (2016, with Hanneke Stuit and Astrid Van Weyenberg) and Other Globes: Past and Peripheral Imaginations of Globalization (2019, with Simon Ferdinand and Irene Villaescusa-Illán). Lien Pham is an Adjunct Fellow in the Graduate Research School at the University of Technology, Sydney. She conducts theoretical and empirical research on international education and development, civil society, globalization, and social policy—combining political philosophy, sociology, and critical theory. She has consulted for various Australian government agencies in policy-focused research and evaluations and for multilateral organizations in Asia Pacific on educational policy reforms. She has published and edited articles and chapters in the areas of international education, philosophy of education, human development, policy, and politics. Her recent books include International Graduates Returning to Vietnam: Experiences of the Local Economies, Universities and Communities (2019) and Political Participation and Democratic Capability in Authoritarian States (2021, with Ance Kaleja). Nigel Rapport is Professor of Anthropological and Philosophical Studies at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. He is also Founding Director of the St Andrews Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies. He has held the Canada Research Chair in Globalization, Citizenship, and Justice at

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Concordia University of Montreal and he has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) and of the Learned Society of Wales (FLSW). His research interests include social theory, phenomenology, identity and individuality, community, conversation analysis, humanism, and links between anthropology and literature and philosophy. His recent books include Anyone, the Cosmopolitan Subject of Anthropology (2012); Distortion and Love: An Anthropological Reading of the Life and Art of Stanley Spencer (2016); and Cosmopolitan Love: Ethical Engagement beyond Culture (2019). Kenneth J. Saltman is Professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at University of Illinois Chicago. His books include The Swindle of Innovative Educational Finance (2018), Scripted Bodies (2016), The Politics of Education: A Critical Introduction (2018, 2nd edition), and The Wiley Handbook of Global Education Reform (2019). Vera Slavtcheva-Petkova is Senior Lecturer in Communications and Media Studies at the University of Liverpool, UK. Prior to joining Liverpool, she worked at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, UK, and the University of Chester, UK. She is the author of Global Journalism: An Introduction (2018, with Michael Bromley) and Russia’s Liberal Media: Handcuffed but Free (2018). She has also published journal articles in four main research areas: global and international journalism with a focus on Russia and Eastern Europe; children, young people, and the media; nationalism, banal Europeanism, and the media; the Internet’s role in relation to risks and opportunities for young people and democratic deliberative potential with a focus on online comments. Alex Taek-Gwang Lee is Professor of cultural studies at Kyung Hee University in South Korea and a visiting professor at Jamia Millia Islamia University in India. He is a member of the advisory board for the International Deleuze and Guattari Studies in Asia and board member of the International Consortium of Critical Theory (ICCT). He is also a member of the Asia Theories Network (ATN). He edited the third volume of The Idea of Communism (2016) and published articles in various journals such as Telos and Philosophy Today and chapters in Back to the ’30s?: Recurring Crises of Capitalism, Liberalism, and Democracy (2020) and Balibar/ Wallerstein’s “Race, Nation, Class”: Rereading a Dialogue for Our Times (2018). Robert T. Tally Jr. is the NEH Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English at Texas State University. He is the author of numerous books, including Topophrenia: Place, Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination (2019); Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectical Criticism (2014); Poe and the Subversion of American Literature (2014); Utopia in the Age of Globalization (2013); Spatiality (2013); and Melville, Mapping, and Globalization (2009). His edited collections include Teaching Space, Place, and Literature (2018); The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space (2017); Ecocriticism and Geocriticism (2016); The Geocritical Legacies of Edward W. Said (2015); Literary Cartographies (2014); and Geocritical Explorations (2011). Tally is the general editor of “Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies,” a Palgrave Macmillan book series. Michael Thomas is Professor of Education and Chair of the Centre for Educational Research (CERES) at Liverpool John Moores University in the UK. He has worked at universities in the UK, Germany, and Japan and is the author or editor of over thirty books and peerreviewed special editions and editor of four book series, including Digital Education and

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Learning (with Mark Warschauer and John Palfrey) and Global Policy and Critical Futures in Education (with Jeffrey R. Di Leo). Veronika Wittmann is Associate Professor of Global Studies in the Department of Modern History and Contemporary History at the Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria. Her research interests include globalization and world society, digital diplomacy and science diplomacy, sustainable development, gender, and development studies with a regional focus on sub-Saharan Africa. Her books (in German), include World Society: Reconstruction of a Scientific Discourse (2014), Women in the New South Africa: Analysis of Equity between the Sexes (2005), and Nehanda’s Unruly Daughters: An Analysis of Zimbabwean Women’s Organizations (1999). Zahi Zalloua is Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature and Professor of French and Interdisciplinary Studies at Whitman College and editor of The Comparatist. His publications include Montaigne and the Ethics of Skepticism (2005); Reading Unruly: Interpretation and its Ethical Demands (2014); Continental Philosophy and the Palestinian Question: Beyond the Jew and the Greek (2017); Theory’s Autoimmunity: Skepticism, Literature, and Philosophy (2018); Žižek on Race: Toward an Anti-Racist Future (2020); and Being Posthuman: Ontologies of the Future (2021).

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Introduction: World Theory in the New Millennium JEFFREY R. DI LEO AND CHRISTIAN MORARU

Disciplines from literary-cultural criticism and cybernetics to environmental studies and economics have been undergoing of late a spectacular and complex reorientation, the result of which is the incremental if still contentious recentering of entire fields, epistemologies, methodologies, and vocabularies on “world” and its prefixed and suffixed brethren. The planet’s ensemble of animate and inanimate existence—the world seen as a largely integrated and finite whole—has thus over the past few decades swam into scholars’ ken, challenging and reframing their basic inquiries. Picking up the gauntlet of the world-as-world, today’s humanities and sciences, we argue, are accordingly becoming themselves “worlded,” participating in the transdisciplinary fostering of a veritable world discourse. This means pursuing basically two objectives, usually at the same time. One is describing and theorizing the world, more exactly, attempting new, or with a new urgency, such descriptions and theorizations in response to the contemporary crises of the surrounding, empirical world itself; the other is deploying such descriptions and theorizations to rethink the work done across disciplines. This discourse’s conceptual sphere comprises and activates, on one side, “world” and the semantic cluster derived from this word’s use as a noun, verb, adjective, or adverb, and on the other side, “planet,” “earth,” “globe,” and other cognate terms that designate, depending on context, use, and user, realities equivalent to or distinct from “world” entirely or in part. Such terminological developments speak and have been instrumental, we also contend, to an entire, spectacular paradigm shift—to a reframing of intellectual problematics across cognitive and geopolitical areas. This has been a change largely prompted by a novel, holistic, or world-systemic view of realities heretofore treated, comparatively speaking, predominantly as unrelated, location-bound or, better yet, location-limited occurrences. It has become more and more obvious, in hindsight, that even the quintessential cultural location of modernity, national territory, complete with the symmetrically national culture presumed to flourish inside its area, is de facto a “transareal” formation. That is, this space, national as it is, proves on closer inspection inconceivable outside transnational and often planetary exchanges and dis-locations—otherwise put, largely Romantic, putative signatures of home, domestic place, and sovereignty such as “national” literature and culture are “out of place” and out of that particular place, as Ottmar Ette, Horst Nitschack, and others have abundantly demonstrated over the past decades.1 While the birth of this novel view, vision, or, more exactly, world vision can be traced throughout cultural history and across traditions Western and nonWestern, its proliferation abruptly intensifies, takes on recognizably contemporary features,

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and becomes in fact a hallmark of the contemporary in the humanities, the arts, and beyond after the end of the Cold War and especially during the last twenty-odd years. Not so much an end of history à la Francis Fukuyama, the late 1980s–1990s interval did bring about the crisis if not the complete demise of a scholarly mindset dominated by a world en miettes, as the French would say, in fragments, and therefore dealt with “piece by piece.” The correspondent growth into prominence of a competing world paradigm, to wit, the advent of the world-as-world, of the world as one or, more likely, of a world transiting visibly, demonstrably, and faster than ever before to a one-world condition following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ever accelerating economic, informational, and cultural integration spurred by the internet and other early-1990s hi-tech breakthroughs, could be neither inhibited nor obfuscated by the geopolitical backdrop over and against which such integration has taken place. This background—the real world itself—has been paradoxically marked by worldcentrifugal actions and reactions such as resurgent nationalisms, fundamentalisms, interethnic strife, tribalism, Brexitism and other populist-isolationist-protectionist flare-ups, as well as by one economic, ecological, and pandemiological debacle after another. These do go to show that the focus on “integration” and on the multifaceted move in practice and thought toward “oneness,” toward planetary “interconnectedness,” should in no way be construed as turning a blind eye to the resilient and sometimes deepening asymmetries and inequalities between North and South, rich and poor, men and women, queer and straight, inhuman and human, sentient and non-sentient, and so forth. Undeniable as they are, such disjunctions, conflicts, disasters, and the more cloistered or seemingly cloistered places experiencing them have become, however, themselves increasingly world-systemic, “worlded” in the sense that, for better or worse, they find it ever more difficult to opt out of the circuitries and transits of the world as system. The most significant and consequential of these developments are systemic on a world scale, and so they hurt nowadays not only local communities and isolated zones and habitats of human and nonhuman existence inside or across nation-states; our planet’s smallest quarters and “remotest” corners—remote with respect to what, one might ask—are affected, for they are willy-nilly part of bigger worlds and of the worldly totality subtending those. Vice versa, the entire world is impacted by actually or seemingly region-specific, “outlying” events and emergencies, from tropical deforestation and the melting of ice caps to the 2007 Wall Street crash, the rise of non-statal terror actors, and the viral outbreak du jour. The Covid-19 pandemic itself is, biologically, socioculturally, and otherwise, the flipside of the endemic, much like the contemporary age, the age of the world, is the reverse, and the “sublation,” of the era of a discrete world—two faces and stages of the same historical and geocultural dialectic.

WORLDING THEORY Pathological or not, this world symptomatology—this terribly mixed “world bag”—has been shaping our present moment in history. More and more defined as the post-1989 or, as some would insist, post-2001 interval rather than the period since the Second World War or even since 1968, the contemporary era itself has been prompting humanists and scientists to world their epistemologies and upgrade their toolkits accordingly, or at least to wonder what it would take to do so, and what the causes and benefits of doing so may be. This “worlding” has come down to several things occurring either independently or in some kind of combination. Institutionally and, some would say, more superficially, this has involved, for instance, an expansion of disciplinary technologies and lexicons across the world, usually out

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of Western hubs of knowledge production.2 In that, the worlding of subject matters, curricula, terminologies, and academic trends and fads has just carried on good old cultural mimesis of colonial times. As such, it would have just done the bidding of outright globalization— of globalization as Westernization, to be more precise—if it had not also furthered the objectives of some at the receiving end of such knowledge exports and imports, including today’s Chinese imperialism.3 Either way, what we are talking about is a certain alignment of education and principally of higher-education systems worldwide, globally and therefore geographically, spatially. But “world” is neither globe nor space, much like, as Martin Heidegger would add, it is not “earth” either. Or if, depending on circumstances, world also equals space—and sometimes it does, within and without common parlance—it is far more than that. Granted, in a sense, world is our environment and what lies “in” it (Heideggerian Umwelt) as in the biggest container we can fancy. In that respect, there is certainly a sense of spatiality, too, of objective presence and “objectuality” (totality of objects around us) to the world, which can be grasped by earthlings as a sort of geophysical or geographical totality. But this “gigantic” totality is, dixit Heidegger in “The Age of the World Picture,” a quantitative and quantifiable entity.4 It is a tally of ontic substance, a “volume,” which attributes we would set aside for “globe” or “earth,” as the case may be. And so, whereas this spatial meaning of “world” will always and inevitably be in play, critics like Eric Hayot and Pheng Cheah are right to call attention, also via Heidegger, to the non-spatial, ontological dimension of world.5 This dimension is qualitative, among other things also because it makes allowances for radical coming into being, for appearances, revelations, and transformations—in brief, for worldings, including worldings or rearrangements of the world itself and by virtue of which this world is no longer or not in the first place a continuum of measurable and exploitable ontic material but a domain of ontological potential. This possibility is revealed as transformative relationality—not a calculable presence that is already, but a co-presence that remains “incalculable” and virtual. While we do not see the world as expanse necessarily and irrevocably incompatible with the cognitive and ethical benefits of this incalculability and its relational onto-logic, we recognize that what affords the truly transformative thrust of “worlding” is a world understood as being with others. More to the point, if world is conceivable as a “space,” this is one in which being and knowing must take into account as much and as “far” (again, from where?) as possible others, their “otherwise,” and their “elsewhere,” no matter how different and far-flung those living entities, places, and existential and cultural modes may be. What becomes feasible once this ethical extension of recognition has taken place is a range of changes—new world setups or new worldings of the known world—that are, we believe, more interesting and deeper reaching than the spread and replication of extant knowledge throughout an equally existing world. These are transformations of knowledge that might wind up transforming the world itself as they echo and further activate a more authentic worlding, a rethinking or retheorizing of disciplinary thinking itself with the world inside systems of knowledge as “world” seized ontologically and ethically, not just geographically or geopolitically, becomes their master epistemological operator. We proposed earlier that this change is unfolding. In praxis, it has entailed increased interest in analytical-methodological protocols such as the scale and scope of investigation and, relatedly, a new dynamic of micro and macro schemes of scholarship; “deep-time” and “long-space” epistemologies, which have spread across the humanities; world-systemic approaches drawing from cognate, vastly interdisciplinary models that include globalization theory and world-systems theories of the supra-regional (oceanic, hemispheric, or planetary)

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sort, world network society, and various kinds (geopolitical, digital, etc.) of network foci; world risk society, world history, Weltliteratur, and several versions of ecosystemic planetarity; a whole range of old and new cosmopolitanisms (bourgeois, colonial, “rooted”) and utopia definitions and applications; the Anthropocene as a historical stage of the world system, and so forth. These are “worlded” forms and measures of spatiality—spaces, sites, and grids of “spatialized” difference and, as such, new frameworks for knowledge correlating here and there, former metropolises and indigenous homelands, native and immigrant, whites and non-whites, straight and queer, animate and inanimate, cultural and natural environments, as well as their attendant distinctions and overlaps. As we would also remind our readers, “world” entered disciplines and its usage became the norm at specific points in time. This is the case of history, inside which H. G. Wells created “world history” with the publication of his Outline of History after the First World War (1921)—incidentally, the Outline was supposed to be brought out by the emerging “League of Nations,” but because the text spurred intense disagreement, the author went ahead and published it on his own.6 In philosophy, however, “world”’s forays have remained rather tentative to this day, and, despite Heidegger’s enduring influence, the concept has yet to have a truly broad impact outside Continental tradition. These asymmetries notwithstanding, the world has indubitably taken pride of place in a range of conversations across fields and specialties, with a number of seminal thinkers moving or returning to the spotlight inside or outside their initial fields, from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Karl Marx to Heidegger, Immanuel Wallerstein, Patrick Manning, Manuel Castells, Thomas L. Friedman, Ulrich Beck, Peter Singer, David Damrosch, Wai Chee Dimock, Pascale Casanova, Kwame Anthony Appiah, David Harvey, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, to name but a few. One thing we did not want to do here is foreordain or preclude what our individual contributors tell us about “world” and the bearings of “worlding” on this or that sector of human life and knowledge. To that effect, we have done our best to keep our biases and agendas under control. That said, we did not think this was the place to wax self-righteously for a thousandth time on the villainies of globalization, even though, as noted here and elsewhere in the Handbook, “world” and “globe” are joint at their conceptual hip, and what is more, careful dissociations between the two as well as a critique of globalization remain inevitable in most discussions of the world problematics.7 Directly and indirectly engaging with their trailblazing disciplinary work, each chapter in this volume examines what “world” means and what it concretely accomplishes in the context of a specific zone of research. Routinely, the participants in this project raise questions such as: What happens when “world” is appended to a particular form of humanistic or scientific study? How exactly does “worlding” refashion the theoretical operating system and the history of that field? What is the dominant theory that allows “world” to function in a meaningful way in coordination with that knowledge purview?

STRUCTURE AND FOCI The Handbook is divided into four parts, each of them corresponding to a general area of academic inquiry. This is an organizational strategy that emphasizes the disciplinary range of the worlding of theory. And while arguments may be produced as to which of these broad domains is more foundational or generative of world theory, we think that all four of them make key contribution to it, and so we will leave debate on disciplinary foundations to others.

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Moreover, as many of the chapters in this volume move fluidly among fields or specialties outside of their major topic of concern, each of this book’s four sections should ultimately be viewed in potential interdisciplinary dialogue. Part One is devoted to knowledge arenas commonly associated with the arts and humanities. Though work on worlding and world theory in this zone moves in a variety of new directions well represented by our contributors, it often traces its genealogy back to pioneering nineteenth-century world theory figures such as Goethe, and perhaps more often, to seminal twentieth-century thinkers such as Heidegger. Accordingly, each of the chapters in this section establishes, to varying degrees, a dialogue between older work in the arts and humanities, on one side, and, on the other, the changing conditions and challenges of the new millennium. Thus, in “Worlding History,” Fabio López Lázaro argues that historians have been at the forefront of analyzing how humans have conceived of their continuities and discontinuities with contemporaries and ancestors in terms of worlds of similarity or difference. But they have also constructed, says Lázaro, worlding narratives of their own in order to group civilizations, periods, or large-scale movements and globalizing phenomena meaningfully. Using Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori’s tripartite conceptualization as a starting point, Lázaro summarizes historiography’s contribution to revealing salient worlding metaphors humans have lived by and considers critical aspects of the differentiation that Serge Gruzinski and others have made between mondialization and globalization. The chapter also explores how these theoretical approaches to sorting out complex historical worldings are analytically affected by the recent theoretical distinction some historians have made between historical projects and processes. For Brian O’Keeffe, philosophy is defined by its own prerogative to think the “World.” Yet philosophy also acknowledges, as it must, that the world is a reality locating our sense of “home” and “away,” a reality that offers itself to discovery, encounter, and to the rendezvous between the self and the other. O’Keeffe’s “Worlding Philosophy” aims to inspect how philosophy contemplates staying at home or else envisages venturesome journeys farther afield. An additional aim—if and when philosophy does embark on such journeys—is to determine what vehicle best serves philosophy’s conveyance to the wider world. One vehicle, this chapter posits, is translation. But what accompanies philosophy upon its translational journeys remains difficult to determine: philosophy’s truths, perhaps, or indeed the logos, that Greek word which underpins philosophy’s putative identity—in the West, at least—as philosophia. At issue, for itineraries of philosophical worlding, is therefore this: a questionable but oft-claimed Greek identity for philosophy that simply must not be lost in translation. The next three chapters deal in turn with worlding ethics, art, and literature and might be regarded as merely involving the subarea of philosophy known as “value theory.” But in the hands of their respective contributors, the philosophical dimensions of these subjects branch out well beyond the narrow (and often arid) confines of value theory to reveal some of the more extraordinary interdisciplinary dimensions of worlding. In “Worlding Ethics,” Nigel Dower explores the world ethics notion, which became influential in the late twentieth century, and considers its relationship to three other ideas that focus on ethical issues in global/ international relations, namely international ethics, global ethics, and cosmopolitan ethics. In this regard, Dower paves the way for some of the discussion of material on international relations later in Part Three. In this wide-ranging and fascinating chapter, he discusses, among other things, various views about the normative content and forms of justification of any given world/global ethic as a set of norms and values, the prospect of a single world/global ethic emerging and in what forms it would be desirable and undesirable, and the connections

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between world/global ethics and world/global citizenship and how these intersect with the more complex idea of cosmopolitanism. Also, he initiates a conversation that a number of the other chapters continue regarding the relationship of world/global ethics to globalization, particularly as these bear on other topics such as world poverty, the environment, war and peace, and international institutions, matters that are again addressed both directly and indirectly throughout the volume. In “Worlding Art,” Nikos Papastergiadis expands on the cosmopolitanism idea, which was introduced in the Handbook by Dower. In the prevailing use of cosmopolitanism, the term’s meaning is constrained within a normative paradigm. This, maintains Papastergiadis, is at odds with cosmopolitanism’s foundational conception and aesthetic application. In ancient times, the idea of cosmopolitanism was embedded in thoughts on creation, ethics, and cosmology. In the contemporary world, while cosmopolitanism is in decline in moral and political discourses, it remains central to the worldmaking activity of visual artists. Thus, the aim of this chapter is to both recall some of the widest visions of cosmopolitanism and link them to the tacit forms of cosmopolitanism manifest in contemporary art. Papastergiadis focuses on two kinds of agents of cosmopolitanism: the philosophers of antiquity and the artists of contemporaneity. It may also seem bizarre at first, but he reminds us, in a move that foreshadows contributions in Part Four, which is devoted to the natural and formal sciences, that the link between past and present is also found in physics. It is in this discipline that cosmopolitanism began, and it is the reflections produced by contemporary physicists that are once again opening the big questions on the worldview of life and the cosmos. Hans Bertens’s “Worlding Postmodernism” provides an overview of a concept pivotal in the development of the worlding of art, history, religion, philosophy, architecture, and literature, as well as frequently disassociated in the new millennium from the worlding of theory. Bertens traces the journey of postmodernism primarily during the Cold War and assesses its relative worlding during this period and its aftermath. Though his focus is on postmodernism in literary studies, he makes clear that postmodernism had a far-reaching impact in the arts and humanities in general. The transnational character of postmodern literature stages well the current rise of World Literature, particularly if, as Bertens suggests, we follow David Damrosch’s conception of World Literature as “an elliptical reflection of national literatures, with the source and host cultures providing the two foci that generate the elliptical space within which a work lives as world literature.”8 The next chapter, by Christian Moraru, both chronicles in detail the rise of the World Literature paradigm and shows how this paradigm fundamentally changes after the Cold War. “Worlding Comparative Literature” focuses on the ways in which the traditional comparative literature model of analysis has “worlded” in response to historical and epistemological pressures exerted by global mutations in the aftermath of the Cold War, particularly in the third millennium. Moraru reminds us that Goethe and others were, almost two centuries ago, already aware that “the age of world literature was at hand.”9 But, argues Moraru, a true World Literature shift in comparative studies occurs much later, when the insights of visionaries are corroborated by developments in the fast-globalizing world, on one hand, and in postcolonial and global studies, on the other. This chapter tracks this turn by looking at articulations of the “world” concept and methodological realignments obtaining in recent, sometimes controversial scholarship that describes itself or is perceived as World Literature. Whereas history, literature, and philosophy have accumulated a fairly robust body of work on the problematic of world theory, other areas such as music, cinema, and popular culture often take a more generative tack to reach a deeper level of understanding here. In the case

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of “Worlding Popular Culture,” Esther Peeren, its author, stages her approach in relation to work done on the worlding of literature by Moraru, Damrosch, Pheng Cheah, Jennifer Wenzel, and others. As such, Peeren’s engagement of popular culture in significant ways builds off the work of Moraru in the preceding chapter, while at the same time adapting it in important ways because of what she describes as the diffuseness and “overpopulation” of popular culture as compared to literature. Focusing on the film Black Panther (2018) and the television series Pose (2018–2019), Peeren shows how worlding popular culture, in the words of Moraru, “connect[s] the planet’s dots in ways that make visible new configurations, allotments, and hierarchies of space, discourse, community, and power.” She concludes, following Mikhail M. Bakhtin, that a worlding force is not so much a definitive property of cultural artifacts, but rather “something it may have to different degrees and in different directions … depending not only on its content and form, but also on whom it is encountered by and in what context”—a point well illustrated à propos of Black Panther and Pose. In “Worlding Music,” John Mowitt maintains that three articulations of the series “world, music, theory” call for attention when thinking through the problematic of world theory. Put differently, if world theory can be usefully taken up in relation to musical practice, then some attention to this triad is called for, not simply on empirical grounds but as the means by which to tease out aspects of the theoretical properties of the encounter between world and theory. If, as Jean-Luc Nancy has argued, philosophy cannot listen (entendre), then can theory? Does the world of sense decisively sound in theory? The first articulation, argues Mowitt, assumes a certain disciplinary profile, one traced in the emergence of the distinction between musicology (critical or otherwise) and ethnomusicology. What is meant by “world music” finds its footing here, as does the question: is the world of “world music” on the wane? If one hears in this world the world Edward Said sought to designate in “worldliness,” then a second articulation of “world, music, theory” invites consideration of Heidegger’s reflections on world, earth, and Stimmung (attunement). And if the “ringing of sounds” engages the world by producing its relation to what falls beyond its measure, does theory perforce listen to what is out of this world? For Mowitt, the final articulation of the series tracks the world into the sonic environment (with or without nature) where the phenomenon of electromagnetic “whistling” draws attention to what Doug Kahn hears as the “playing” of the earth. What, asks Mowitt, must happen to theory to listen to the musics of this sphere? Like Mowitt, who tracks music into its environment to reach a deeper level of understanding as to music’s worlding, Alex Taek-Gwang Lee follows a similar course with regard to cinema. His “Worlding Cinema” begins with André Bazin’s famous claim that cinema is “an idealistic phenomenon.” For Lee, Bazin’s definition implies, first, that the cinematic phenomenon is only technical in its consequence, and, second, that the idea precedes its technical invention. In this way, cinema necessarily places itself between idealism and realism. Therefore, according to Lee, the concept of “worlding” cinema is potentially suggestive in the context of the ontology of cinema. As a phenomenon, cinema has an ontological structure forging an idea with its means. The technology of mimesis is geared to producing cinematic images, but this technology’s effects are not limited to representation. In this chapter, Lee explores the meaning of “worlding cinema” by expanding on the work of Bazin, Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, and Alain Badiou. Worlding for Lee is the materialistic concept of bringing together subject and environment. Worlding cinema is, in this sense, a philosophical attempt to understand contemporary cinema from the standpoint of nonrepresentational materialism. After the Second World War, cinema is freed from spatio-temporality and is differentiated from the classical sense of cinema. Cinema is any possibility of the future, not

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stuck to the representation of the established past and present. From this perspective, Lee concludes that cinema does not reflect reality but creates the world and, as such, is always already worlding. In the next chapter, we move from the screen to the stage, which Shakespeare famously declared in Hamlet coextensive with the world itself. Still, the Bard’s proclamation aside, the relationship of worlding to the theater arts is complicated. In “Worlding Theater,” Gina Masucci MacKenzie begins by pointing out that globalization, a term sometimes used interchangeably with worlding, is a Western-centric term, with links to colonization even while attempting to achieve a true interdependency of systems and cultures. MacKenzie uses theoretical works by Said, Spivak, and Gloria Anzaldúa to caution against worlding attempts that erase cultural differences. Her chapter argues for new, “third” spaces and for the revolutionary acts of theatrical practice to destabilize former, limiting notions of theater and advocates for acts of theater that honor the worlds in which they occur. The final chapter of this section is “Worlding Religion” by Gerda Heck and Stephan Lanz. However, perhaps more than any of the other chapters in this section, their contribution reveals how the problematics of world theory can pull traditional areas of inquiry in the humanities into dialogue with domains outside of their traditional division of academic knowledge. While Dower, for example, showed how the worlding of ethics is both a concern of the humanities and social science, and Papastergiadis how the worlding of art is one of both the arts and the natural and physical sciences, their work is ultimately not the kind of empirical research typical of the sciences. However, in Heck and Lanz’s chapter, their position on worlding religion is grounded in the empirical scholarship often found in the social sciences, specifically, urban studies. In recent years, this field has brought to light the growing significance of very diverse religious movements in global metropolises. Urban religion, therefore, is not merely conceived as a cluster of religious practices and structures within the city but also as configurations where the religious and the urban are interwoven and mutually transformative. In this chapter, Heck and Lanz address the complex interplay of religion, globality, and urban daily life through a discussion of contemporary manifestations of urban religion and religious urbanity as practices of worlding. Drawing on empirical findings of the research project “Global Prayers—Redemption and Liberation in the City,” they show how religious worlding practices may include globalizing models of urban sociality and spatiality. Using the example of Congolese-based Christian revival churches in Guangzhou, Istanbul, and Rio de Janeiro, they discuss the ways in which religious worlding practices refer to aspirations and imaginations informing religiously motivated attempts to create alternative urban worlds. Part Two is devoted to some zones of academic inquiry commonly associated with the social and behavioral sciences, as well as to some fields of study emerging from more contemporary concerns within this area. As such, the first half of Part Two takes up more traditional disciplines such as economics, sociology, anthropology, and psychoanalysis, while the second half deals with sexuality, gender, queerness, and identity, which are in the new millennium increasingly becoming independent fields of study. Moreover, these are often associated not only with the social and behavioral sciences but also with the humanities and other disciplines. For our purposes, it matters less whether, say, the study of gender (or, gender studies, if you will) is done within the social sciences or the humanities than the ways in which concerns regarding the worlding of gender draw the subject into multidisciplinary and geocultural dialogue. In “Worlding Sociology,” Veronika Wittmann claims that sociology has had a long-standing love affair with the nation-state. In fact, the rise of the discipline began, says Wittmann, with

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the emergence of the nation-state and nationalism. However, faced with the refocusing of fields, methodologies, and vocabularies on the world, sociology is confronted with an often unreflected nation-state paradigm and a state-centric vocabulary, which opposes the perception of the world as a perspective. In this chapter, Wittmann examines what the term “world” accomplishes in sociology by raising the question of what happens when the concept of world is appended to a particular form of sociological inquiry. Furthermore, she explores how the term “worlding” bears on theoretical knowledge and the history of sociology. She concludes that theories or theoretical models that allow world to function in a meaningful way with that knowledge domain are approaches of world society. The next chapter, “Worlding Anthropology” by Nigel Rapport, begins with the observation that at first glance, appending the word world to sociocultural anthropology, the study of our humanity as social creatures, may seem innocuous. But to consider how “worlding” bears historically and theoretically on this field of social science—how “world” is made meaningful in connection to the anthropological project and anthropological knowledge—for Rapport is to adopt a political as well as an epistemological position. What are the things and relations of which human social and cultural life is comprised? What is the precise ontology of “the world” of sociocultural relations? Does human life in society and culture constitute “a” world—“the” world—or are there many such worlds? This chapter takes its lead from the assessment of historian of anthropology George Stocking, according to which the discipline may be viewed as “a continuing (and complex) dialectic between the universalism of anthropos and the diversitarianism of ethnos.” A biological unity and generic rationality insists on one world of humankind, a species wholeness that manifests itself in universal, individually embodied, human lives. But then a diversity and continual variation of cultural forms, representing themselves as symbolic wholes, urge that each culture be deemed a world in itself, a world apart. Rapport elaborates on anthropology’s “recurrent dilemma” (Stocking) by paying particular attention to recent debates over “cosmopolitics,” a move that invites comparison to the cosmopolitanism discussed earlier by both Dower and Papastergiadis with respect to worlding ethics and art. Is there one human “cosmos,” asks Rapport, or must political economy, environmentalism, and ontology ever be mediated by cultural difference? Like Rapport, who notices that adding the word worlding to anthropological concerns is not innocuous, Peter Hitchcock finds a similar situation to obtain with worlding and economics. On the face of it, exploring world theory in terms of contemporary economics should be the easiest of tasks, attached as it is to a sense of political economy that has been worldly for some time. And yet, while globalization is primarily defined economically, as the saturation and circulation of capital at a world scale, the theoretical perquisites of such a world are remarkably provincial, as if the politics of scaling are always in question when a nation or corporation goes “worlding.” In “Worlding Economics,” Hitchcock analyses the extent to which the otherwise compulsive logics of globalization place constitutive limits on the world imagined, which even AI-inspired financial algorithms struggle mightily to sublate. Could it be, asks Hitchcock, that the economic pressure on world as concept presages a world that would paradoxically transform its economic priorities? In regard to this question, Hitchcock considers several examples of thinkers and processes. In “Worlding Psychoanalysis,” Dany Nobus aims to reactivate Ranjana Khanna’s project of worlding psychoanalysis (which she first articulated in her 2003 book Dark Continents) by means of a critical reflection on its key conceptual premises and proposed implementation. While Nobus argues that “worlding psychoanalysis” is at least as necessary and urgent now as it was twenty years ago, both the process and its outcomes might need to be conceived,

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he suspects, in slightly different terms and within more broadly articulated sociopolitical spheres. For this newly advanced worlding of psychoanalysis to succeed, then, the most important task would not so much reside in the progressive parochialization of the original Freudian paradigm, but in the explicit acknowledgment that the object of analysis is inherently mediated by a certain fantasy and that the only way in which this fantasy can be deconstructed is for the subject of analysis to be equally transformed by the very process of analyzing. The remaining chapters in Part Two take up worlding in a number of key fields of study associable in significant ways with the social and behavioral sciences, also attending to some of the more urgent social issues of our time. In “Worlding Women,” Robin Truth Goodman looks at novelist Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last (2015) to ask about what reproduction looks like when it is “scaled up” for global consumption. In Goodman’s analysis, the naturalized body is the realization of “capitalist realism,” where capitalism has been made to seem like the only reality possible—the naturalized body is here the resting ground for the sprawling contradictions that reproduction is unleashing culturally as the status of the biological is increasingly indistinguishable from global and inhuman practices of calculation, public disinvestment, and appropriation for accumulation. Acknowledging that commodification has a long history of integration into reproduction despite the interests of industrialization in keeping it seemingly separate from the violence of capital, the chapter goes on to ask what the time of reproduction contributes to discussions about how the “world” in world literature can be imagined. The next chapter, “Worlding Gender” by Vrushali Patil, opens with the imperial prehistories of the worlding of gender. Long before the gender concept was articulated in the United States in the 1950s, a politics of embodiment, as well as related desires and identities underwrote imperial and colonial expansion across the world. Patil calls this politics the imperial prehistories of gender. The worldings of such processes that bring into play apparently deviant practices and identities of various racialized others are critical in the eventual articulation of the gender concept itself. She then moves on to the other worlds and worldings of anti-racist approaches, which have emerged in the Global North and South in response to the imperial genealogies of gender. Patil shows how these counter-constructions challenge hegemonic worldings of gender and their associated racial-imperial projects. Sri Craven’s “Worlding Queer” engages “worlding” by providing a historical account of theoretical and political issues that generates the field termed “transnational sexuality/queer studies.” Her contribution reviews key themes and concepts to argue that “transnational queer” addresses the racialization of queerness. Craven’s category thus includes the United States too, where it is separated out as “of color” and “diaspora.” It also spans the Global South, with disparate national and regional contexts related to one another, and America through the global circulation of queer cultural, political, and epistemological models. This chapter shows that, ultimately, “queer” illuminates the centrality of sexuality and gender to the idea of modernity, as these two are negotiated differently by power systems and queer subjects within, through, and under the global capitalist system. Zahi Zalloua concludes this part with a look at ethnic studies in his chapter “Worlding Identity.” According to Zalloua, decoloniality and Afro-Pessimism are two recent movements that have energized critical ethnic studies, adopting a stark oppositional stance toward European modernity and its conceptualizations of the “Human.” For decolonial theorist Walter Mignolo, “identity in politics” is preferable to “identity politics”—which still holds a lot of currency in ethnic studies—since, unlike the latter, the former is innately denaturalized, so to speak, lacking any intrinsic properties or force. Identity in politics acknowledges

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that one’s identity has been constructed and allocated by European colonial powers. AfroPessimists, for their part, claim that ethnic studies have systematically misconstrued the enemy as white supremacy. An anti-racist critique must go deeper and engage the legacy of modernity itself: how modernity defined human subjectivity through its constitutive exclusion of blacks (anti-blackness). Even so, the investment in any form of (non)identity carries with it the risk of fetishization, a decolonial retreat into a non-European world, or, conversely, an ontologization of blackness as a negation of the Human, which condemns blacks to a life of worldlessness. Zalluoa takes up the challenges of decoloniality and Afro-Pessimism while exploring alternative ways of worlding the (non)identity of the Non-European—modernity’s marginalized and racialized others. Part Three is devoted to inquiry areas commonly associated with the professions. In our book, these comprise higher education, international education, public policy, international relations, media studies, journalism, architecture, and publishing. Our contributors show how, in these domains of professional life, world theory is put into action to change the world. Each chapter in this section canvasses professional practices as they are tempered by considerations of the politics of worlding theory. While the impact of the worlding of theory in the arts, humanities, and social and behavioral sciences affects the professions, as the chapters in this section show, the professions also impact world theory in these disciplines, often in significant ways. One example is discussed in “Worlding Higher Education” by Michael Thomas. Digital capitalism has deeply impacted public higher education around the world over the last three decades. Its influence is apparent in the growing requirements for efficiency, accountability, and credentialization, expectations that affect almost all aspects of teaching, learning, and research. Although internationalization has been advanced as a potential solution to marketization discourse, its promise has often been all too readily assimilated by this discourse. In attempting to address this context, Thomas argues that global citizenship education should not be interpreted as an excuse for the current hegemony of neoliberalism. Rather, it is worthy of further investigation as an alternative space to pursue real-world educational projects that address the “grand challenges” of the Anthropocene era, from migration to inequality, social justice, and sustainable development. Thomas’s chapter sets the stage for the next one, where Kenneth J. Saltman details how supranational organizations, global corporations, and philanthropies are directing public policy in education with the aim of bringing together privatization schemes and digital technologies. In “Worlding Public Policy,” Saltman shows how these organizations are promoting the quantification of Social Emotional Learning that datafies affect, emotion, and behavior to further a number of commercial projects in public education. This convergence represents a new phase of educational privatization, a stage characterized by enormous repercussions for the circulation of public goods and services, privacy and surveillance, and new forms of social and cultural reproduction. In “Worlding International Education,” Lien Pham claims that the idea of worlding international education is paradoxical for it assumes that international education is not already worldly. Pham reflects on international education as traditionally constituted by fields of power for creating and legitimizing knowledge, as well as a project moving forward. She proposes “worlding” as the world meets the rest, a dialogical model that goes beyond the assumptions of North–South cleavage of knowledge production and consumption and in which knowledge does not essentialize a place or space, rather engendering critical thoughts and activism by people for the world and in the world where they live. A dialogical model recognizes different cultural and epistemological traditions of education as both providing

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the common core values of ethics and lying behind the formation of the self in relations with others. This model does not subsume local interventions under a totalizing theory of international education but analyses specificities of power within the local that locate and extend their connections to the global as an assemblage of knowledge available to social actors to appropriate for varying purposes. The next chapter, Sophia A. McClennen’s “Worlding International Relations,” continues the discussion of the paradoxes of worlding in professional areas that utilize the term international. Like Pham, who aims to break down the North–South divide of knowledge production and consumption in international education, McClennen argues that the problem with international relations theory is not whether or not it is worlded, but rather its acceptance of a selective, inconsistent, and unstable system of sovereignty that favors Western nations. Using the case study of recent international relations with Iran, she suggests that what has to be destabilized are the cognitive containers that are the legible pillars of international relations theory—international law, organizations, states—because inverting, reorganizing, or worlding the core-periphery state model does not get to the principal flaws with global sovereignty itself. Following McClennen’s problematization of Western sovereignty and Pham’s critique of the North–South knowledge axis, Toby Miller and Jesús Arroyave scrutinize in “Worlding Media Studies” efforts to decenter the customary sites for theorizing and analyzing the media, namely the Global North. For decades, effortless extrapolations from unrepresentative examples have theorized, evaluated, and reformed media systems around the globe. But vibrant theoretical and analytic projects have been ongoing elsewhere, albeit often deploying materials from Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment traditions. Miller and Arroyave attend to theories, methods, and examples from the Global South, emphasizing different epistemologies to enrich the field of media studies. Their foci are South Asia and Latin America. Miller and Arroyave aim to show how such concepts as subalternity, post-development political economy, and textual analysis can revitalize and deprovincialize media studies and provide a counterhegemonic discourse to illuminate not only the Global South but the North as well. Where Miller and Arroyave aim to decenter the Global North as the locus of theoretical media studies in general, more fine-grained analyses home in on particular media. One such medium is journalism, the focus of Vera Slavtcheva-Petkova’s intervention. In “Worlding Journalism,” she asks whether journalism studies is a global field of academic research. Based on the analysis of hundreds of articles published in half a dozen journals, Slavtcheva-Petkova shows that the vast majority of journalism scholarship studies originate in the Global North and are based in European and US universities. As such, journalism studies is found to be not a truly global field of academic inquiry. To become one, it need not only increase the number of studies on the Global South but also recognize the diversity of journalistic cultures and intellectual thought in this part of the world. A first step in achieving this is moving away from normative liberal theory and ceasing to impose Western norms on non-Western societies. The next chapter in this section, “Worlding Publishing” by Jeffrey R. Di Leo, builds on two important aspects of publishing that are at once obvious and profound: first, books provide us with a picture of the world; and second, it is a picture that is tempered by the gatekeeping of publishers who determine which authors and what books are made public. The first direction, the world picturing function of publishing noted by Heidegger, concerns the philosophical and theoretical dimensions of bookmaking and distribution, or what he terms “world publishing”; and the second direction, the gatekeeping function of publishing mentioned by Heidegger, pertains to the sociological and economic dimensions of publication activities, or what he

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terms “the publishing world.” Di Leo’s thesis is that these two fundamental approaches to considerations of “world” and “publishing” yield radically differing visions of the role of publishing in the world. The latter fashions publishers as the legislators of the world based on strategic (or, perhaps in the most extreme circumstances, neoliberal) marketing and economic principles, whereas the former affords the world the opportunity to fashion publishing as the measure of biopolitical health. Finally, Richard Ingersoll speculates, in the last chapter of this Part, on how the profession of architecture might be defined by “worlding.” Starting with the premise that “worlding” and architecture are not yet an agreed-upon combination in the profession, Ingersoll proposes a definition of “worlding architecture” as design acts that manifestly attempt to avert global warming. As with any definition, this chapter examines, by using examples from contemporary practice, what worlding architecture is not, what it might sometimes appear to be, and what ideally it should be. Worlding here is conceived as an alternative to globalization. It embodies the urgency of the twenty-first-century struggle between mass consumer society and biological extinction. The design of buildings, cities, and landscapes are crucial factors in the race to mitigate climate change disasters. These latter topics, including imminent biological extinction and environmental crises, prove to be a fitting segue into the problematics discussed in the Handbook’s final segment. Part Four is dedicated to academic inquiries commonly associated with the natural and formal sciences. As such, while considerations common in cybernetics, biology, mathematical logic, and the earth sciences inform the chapters in this section, each contribution utilizes some combination of work in the arts, humanities, and social sciences to shed light on worlding developments in the natural and formal sciences. The texts gathered here speak, perhaps more eloquently than any others in this volume, to the interdisciplinary risks and rewards of pushing the boundaries of the natural and formal sciences so as to achieve significant insight into a more comprehensive vision of worlding. We saw a bit of this visionary potential at play earlier, for example, in Papastergiadis’s use of cosmology to make his case for the worlding of art or later in Di Leo’s call for a biopolitical approach to world publishing. However, in this Part, cosmological and biopolitical considerations become primary concerns with worldly consequences that often bear on the future of our world in terms of catastrophe. The first two chapters consider worlding from the perspective of logic and spatiality studies, respectively. Thus, in the case of logic, Paul M. Livingston explains how the worlding of logic has been a preoccupation for most of the twentieth century and continues into the new millennium in the revolutionary philosophical work of Alain Badiou. In “Worlding Logic,” Livingston traces several of the ways that projects of overall logic have been understood as illuminating the structure of world or totality, in the singular or plural. In addition to Badiou’s Logics of Worlds (2006), Livingston explores twentieth-century work on the worlding of logic in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), Rudolph Carnap’s Logical Structure of the World (1928), and David Lewis’s On the Plurality of Worlds (1986). Then, in “Worlding Spatiality Studies,” Robert T. Tally Jr. shows how in recent decades, the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences has been marked by an enhanced awareness of the significance of space, place, and mapping, and a planetary turn has reoriented spatial critical theory and practice toward a global frame of reference. The conception of the “world,” which can be closely related to both spatiality and planetarity, profoundly influences the ways we imagine space and place. Worlds may be either vaster or more limited than other spatial frameworks, and the negotiation of worldly spaces presents challenges to traditional means of mapping or making sense of one’s place. In this chapter, Tally discusses the effects of worlding

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on spatiality studies with examples ranging from the individual subject’s phenomenological experience to a scarcely representable global totality. In the next two chapters, attention turns to cybernetics, or the study of technical and biological systems as informational and adaptive, thus capable of formalization as communicational circuits subject to regulative intervention. The field’s founding document is Cybernetics: Control and Communication in Human and Animals, MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener’s 1984 book, which gained popularity in large part as an early explanation of computation and its impact on society. Weiner tells us that he derived the term “cybernetics” from the Greek κυβερνήτης (kybernḗtēs), which designated both the helmsperson of a vessel and the governor of the “ship” of state. For Wiener, the concept defines the operation of “control” as giving out informational orders to modify the conduct of a human, animal, or machine. In “Worlding Cybernetics,” Andrew Culp tracks the worlding of cybernetics in three ways: as a military-capitalist engineering approach to the technical, as an intellectual formation of academics and creative artists, and as a philosophical metaphysics of technological worlds. The first uncovers cybernetics’ military origins, capitalist uptake, and their relationship to Cold War anxieties embedded in a new approach to vision and cognition intensified in our information society. The second explores its implementations by practitioners in a variety of fields following and responding to the interdisciplinary Macy conferences (anthropology, communication engineering, cognitive science, behaviorism), unexpected/global contexts (arts, counterculture, and literature inside and outside the United States), and new inquiry areas (informatization/AI, the behavioral revolution, systems theory, chaos/complex theory, environmental thinking). Last, Culp considers, through a discussion of Heidegger’s brief but controversial comments on cybernetics as “replacing thinking,” how cybernetics has sought to circumvent metaphysics, and he also assesses, along the same lines, the discipline’s role in the rise of structuralism and systems theory, as well as a contemporary approach to ontology. In “Worlding Systems Theory,” Bruce Clarke addresses systems theory in its secondorder line of development, neocybernetic systems theory (NST), one that takes off from the recursive turn in second-order cybernetics and from the concept of autopoiesis developed in biological systems theory. Niklas Luhmann radicalized second-order cybernetics’ epistemological constructivism and lifted the conceptual architecture of autopoiesis out  of its original biological reference, reformatting them within his theory of social systems as composed of communications (rather than persons). Within NST, social systems theory also develops a concept of world society. Modernity brings world society forth as the final horizon of psychic and social operations. Critical perspectives on world society as constituted in social systems theory include the alternative world concepts in John Law’s amalgamation of science and technology studies (STS), actor-network theory (ANT), and Arturo Escobar’s systems-theoretical approach to design theory. In Luhmann’s own presentation, functional differentiation in world society generates inequality and social exclusion as a matter of course. Because social systems cannot be steered, they must be nudged by their environments. Moreover, world society may also be placed in planetary context as open to the psychic processing of ecological noise or, in Isabelle Stengers’s phrase, the intrusion of Gaia. This newly insistent recognition of environmental agency informs Lynn Margulis’s world concept of autopoietic Gaia, a system concept with the potential to change world society’s current course toward an ecological dead-end. These two chapters on cybernetics are followed by one that investigates the study of biological world-building in particular. In “Worlding Biology,” Adam Nocek argues that biology has always been interested in constructing worlds: the unseen worlds of microscopic

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organisms, the hypothetical worlds of theoretical entities, the contagious worlds of viruses and bacteria, the paranoid worlds of cellular mutations and other evolutionary abnormalities, and so on. Until about the mid-twentieth century, biology drew on a patchwork of media and practices from across the arts, design, cinema, mathematics, and other domains to build worlds of meaning and value for wet and unruly living systems. Today, however, the diversity of techniques used in the biosciences has been significantly streamlined. With the rapid development of computational tools in the post-genomic era, thanks to advances in complex dynamical systems and machine learning, the many worlds of biology are increasingly becoming subsets of one computational world. Whether it is an epigenetic system, a physical system, or a global economic system, the mathematics underwriting the complexity sciences is capable of reducing (or so the argument goes) the richness and heterogeneity of biological organization to a single grid of computational intelligibility. Nocek provides a speculative media history of how biology “lost its worlds” and how it might go about reclaiming them. His essay shows that the project of “worlding biology” today requires designing alternative practices of mediation to counter the algorithmic regulation of biological worlds through techniques of biopolitical governance. While at least part of this project of biological “counter-conduct” entails reviving the heterogeneity of pre-genomic worlds, it also involves drawing on the most recent developments in theoretical biology to show how the plurality of biological worlds is irreducible to the single world presupposed by the information-theoretic metaphysics of the complexity sciences. In short, for Nocek, biological worlds are too complex for computational complexity. The final two chapters in this section are concerned with how world theory’s turn toward the environment, the climate, and the earth foregrounds the destiny of the Anthropocene. In “Worlding Environmental Studies,” Robert P. Marzec shows how from the early Spinozistand Heideggerian-influenced writings of Bill Devall and George Sessions in the 1970s to the materialist feminist ecology of Donna Haraway of the last decade, “world” and “worlding” carry a central place in the history of environmental studies. Recent humanistic and scientific conceptualizations of the world under the sign of “the Anthropocene,” however, have come to radically trouble theories of “worlding” and our capacity to imagine and construct a “world” that would in any way be meaningful or even survivable. Planetwide events such as climate change, species extinction, neoliberal globalization, resource scarcity, and “the great acceleration” are of a scale that extends far beyond previous philosophical frameworks. Formerly relevant representations and constitutions of the natural world—Romantic, preservationist, conservationist, utilitarian, etc.—fail to offer the kind of powerful purchase they once enjoyed. The earth has moved well outside of the range of its former (Holocene) condition of being. As the climate scientist Will Stefen argues, we are now operating in a “noanalogue” state—that is, there are no equivalents for our current environmental situation to any past human or geological history. Academic disciplines across the sciences and humanities have begun to reconceptualize our former worldly environmental conceits in light of this new Anthropocene destiny. In his chapter, Marzec considers a number of these efforts. Finally, Claire Colebrook brings up the rear of this collection with a reflection on “end-ofthe-world-mania.” In “Worlding Earth and Climate Studies,” she argues that post-apocalyptic culture is dependent on a specifically modern sense of “world.” That is, the “world” is neither the planet nor animate existence, but a horizon of sense and interconnectedness that is increasingly subject to any number of possible ends. Even if what has come to be known as “the world” has often demanded the annihilation, assimilation, or erasure of other modes of human existence, the twenty-first century is more than ever committed to saving the world.

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If, however, one were to embrace a positive sense of “worldlessness,” there might be a chance for the earth and many humans not embraced by the humanity that is rich in world. Thus, for Colebrook, the end of the world is possibly the beginning of the earth.

NOTES 1 See, for example, the collective volume Trans*Chile: Un acercamiento transareal, ed. Ottmar Ette and Horst Nitschack (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2010), especially Nitschack’s opening piece “La literatura chilena fuera de lugar (1973–2008),” 11–12, passim. A similarly systematic if somewhat different case, tied more directly into the recent arguments and vocabularies of “worlding,” has been made across another essay collection, Romanian Literature as World Literature, ed. Mircea Martin, Christian Moraru, and Andrei Terian (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018). A more in-depth theorization of this problem is provided in the introduction to Romanian Literature as World Literature (Moraru and Terian, “Introduction: The Worlds of National Literature and the Geopolitics of Reading,” 1–31). 2 See Theo D’haen, “Worlding the Social Sciences and Humanities,” European Review 24.2 (2016): 186–99. 3 This is basically one’s takeaway from Wang Ning’s article “Globalization, Humanities, and Social Sciences: An Introduction and a Commentary,” which opens a special-topic issue of European Review (24.2 [2016]: 177–85) and may well have intended to argue something else if not the opposite. 4 Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. and intro. William Lovitt (New York: HarperCollins, 2013), 135. 5 See Pheng Cheah’s What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 98–103; Eric Hayot, “Worldiness,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, ed. Jeffrey R. Di Leo (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 741–42. For a broader discussion of the problem in Hayot, also see his On Literary Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 23–9, passim. 6 See, Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Catastrophe and Higher Education: Neoliberalism, Theory, and the Future of the Humanities (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 35. 7 Christian Moraru’s Reading for the Planet: Toward a Geomethodology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015) is one of the places where such distinctions have been offered, along with the critique they enable. Also see Christian Moraru, “Worlding Comparative Literature,” note 39, in this volume. 8 David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 283. 9 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Conversations with Eckermann on Weltliteratur,” in World Literature in Theory, ed. David Damrosch (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 19.

WORKS CITED Cheah, Pheng. What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Damrosch, David. What Is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Damrosch, David, ed. World Literature in Theory. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014. D’haen, Theo. “Worlding the Social Sciences and Humanities.” European Review 24.2 (2016): 186–99. Di Leo, Jeffrey R. Catastrophe and Higher Education: Neoliberalism, Theory, and the Future of the Humanities. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Ette, Ottmar, and Horst Nitschack. Trans*Chile: Un acercamiento transareal. Madrid, Spain: Iberoamericana, 2010.

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Hayot, Eric. On Literary Worlds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Hayot, Eric. “Worldiness.” In The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory. Ed. Jeffrey R. Di Leo. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. 741–42. Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. with an intro by William Lovitt. New York: HarperCollins, 2013. Moraru, Christian. Reading for the Planet: Toward a Geomethodology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015. Moraru, Christian, and Andrei Terian. “Introduction: The Worlds of National Literature and the Geopolitics of Reading.” In Romanian Literature as World Literature. Eds. Mircea Martin, Christian Moraru, and Andrei Terian. New York: Bloomsbury, 2018. 1–31. Ning, Wang. “Globalization, Humanities, and Social Sciences: An Introduction and a Commentary.” European Review 24.2 (2016): 177–85. Nitschack, Horst. “La literatura chilena fuera de lugar (1973-2008).” In Trans*Chile: Un acercamiento transareal. Eds. Ottmar Ette and Horst Nitschack. Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2010. 11–26.

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PART ONE

Arts and Humanities

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CHAPTER ONE

Worlding History FABIO LÓPEZ LÁZARO

porer mukhe jhal khaowa [to taste the taste of chili from other people’s mouths] Dipesh Chakrabarty, in Amitav Ghosh and Dipesh Chakrabarty, “A Correspondence on Provincializing Europe”1 Historians have been at the forefront of analyzing how humans have conceived of their continuities and discontinuities with others, diachronically as well as synchronically, as worlds of similarity or difference. Perhaps this is because, unlike all other human sciences, history literally permeates everything human about the world. Consider that we can easily conceive a history of everything but not an everything of history, except figuratively speaking—a history of chemistry but not a chemistry of history in any comparable way. Historians’ concerns for categories, then, are inherently global. However, our brief here is more specific: to explore how history as a discipline has been and will continue to be worlded for good research reasons; not just as a choice (to which this essay’s title gestures) but as an obligation to do something beyond what Linda Colley has wittily called “selective history.” For even really good national history-writing on occasion “hampers” our understanding of the particular historical event or phenomenon under scrutiny.2 Accordingly, we will re-survey historiographical territory already well mapped out only to keep ourselves on this track.3 The toughest questions lie elsewhere, if we take for granted that Marc Bloch was right in saying in 1934 that “The shared location [of multiple phenomena over time] is nothing but chaos: only the unity of the [historical] question provides focus.”4 When is world, then, the right qualifier for an investigation’s answer? Consideration must initially involve the metaphorical ambiguity attached to world(ing) in historical investigations. Sorting this out not by stipulating axiomatic scales of analysis but by dissecting the diverse relationships of researcher to evidence (meta-analytical, substantive, and subjective) will lead us to a prescriptive set of interrelated correctives concerning agency and intentionality. Precise understanding of the researcher-evidence pairing arguably constitutes history’s greatest cognitive contribution to the human sciences—in company with its two closest sister disciplines, diagnostic medicine and forensic fact-finding or law (analogous processes in my view if we adapt Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s description of “source criticism” as “the method by which one approaches, evaluates, reconciles, or rejects” not just textual evidence but any evidence of reality).5 For the how, what, when, and where of the things we did and the why we did them constitute the only historicizable parts of reality; and being able to document the factual existence of, and differentiate between, specific persons’ agency and intentionality, their “complex rationalizations”—to name names in histoire événementielle while analyzing the multiple contexts of any person’s or people’s experience of a singular event—takes us from anonymous “prehistory” into “history.”6

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It is nevertheless salutary to remain skeptical as to why the world today (or at least the experts who spill so much ink over it, who constitute perhaps a world unto themselves in this age of anti-expertism) is so obsessed with its own worldliness, if I am permitted the irreverent pun. “It would be perverse,” writes one medievalist judiciously, “to imbue connectedness with some sort of innate glamour.”7 As Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller have stressed, it is good to steer our investigations carefully between the Charybdis of traditional history’s “methodological nationalism” and today’s penchant for “the Scylla of methodological fluidism.”8 At the largest remove of “universal history” Hervé Inglebert advises us wisely to nurture “methodological doubt” about past persons’ “totalities” of meaningfulness (saying people’s might assume a unified ethnic totality): just because the planet is “an important notion for us, it does not follow that it was so at other times or elsewhere, or even that it was conceived as such.”9 Besides, globalization’s hold on us may be loosening, as micro-mesomacro linkages between the physical totalities from local to global levels are upset or even replaced by what I call the electronic shelf (the world wide web). Business people, Marc Augé observes, can live mostly—and sometimes most successfully—in “non-places,” in airplanes, for instance, travelling from business-homogenized point to point, in electronic communion with each other but practically not with anyone else around them: networks, not worlds may be becoming the hegemonic metaphor for life itself.10 Yet, lest we hypothesize rashly about a too modern complexity fueled by totalizing petrol and electricity, we should recall how the Anglo-Saxon word weorold, like the Christian Latin saecula, could mean the globe, all humanity (occasionally, just Christians), an era, or an individual’s total life; and, beyond that, all earthly possessions and the labor we put into them. Augé’s modern globalizing point-to-point electronic corporate network would, I think, have been convincingly dismissed by Alfred the Great’s translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy as nothing but another worthless, self-important ambition to constitute oneself as the world: “in the vastness of the real world your glory will be like a small point.”11 Historicizing such projections (of self or others) while disambiguating them hermeneutically is the key, whether one agrees with Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s deep medieval origins for scholarly worlding12 or with Bruce Mazlish’s thesis that post-Enlightenment globalization history is not world or universal history.13 Nor need one accept Arif Dirlik’s insistence that “worldwide” and “transnational” should always be differentiated, for even a national history is rarely about the history of all the nationals living in it; and evidence of enough transnationality makes for globality of a kind, I suggest, akin to weorold’s and saecula’s meanings. Descending or ascending scales of analysis do not imply imprecision, as William McNeill observed in 1982: The Kingdom of England is just as real as the city of London or the borough of Westminster, and for some purposes, the larger entity is both more definite and more important … A tree is a tree. It is also several millions of cells and millions upon millions of molecules and atoms. But no one supposes that accurate description of a tree can only be attempted by describing all its cells, still less every molecule and atom. On the contrary, the tree is liable to disappear entirely if one tries to descend to such minutiae … in recognizing each tree as part of a forest and the forest as part of an ecosphere that extends right round the globe, we change scale without necessarily losing precision of meaning … Precision and truthfulness do not necessarily increase as the scale becomes smaller.14 Though I take issue with McNeill’s conflation of precision and accuracy, I would readily agree that historical worlding which reveals the forest previously obscured by the trees does

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indeed uncover, as one view puts it, “an interpretive dimension that is less parcelled-out” than, say, the all too familiar and under-theorized national one (and can do so without “falling into the model-based schematisms offered by traditional ‘grand narratives’.”)15 An inquiry ideally matching heuristic categories with evidential ones can achieve, as the legal historian Mirjan Damaška puts it, “sufficient cognitive empathy with the then-dominant worldview,” even disagreeable ones like medieval torture16—or with subaltern worldviews, as the case may be. One should not shy away, nevertheless, from the incontrovertible evidence that professional world history was established alongside nineteenth-century nationalist historicism, leaving us with globalizing and nationalizing agendas as paradoxical partners (though a Rankean case will be made later for re-reading historicism as empiricist historism17 and then pondering its ironic link to worlding). Inevitable resistance often appears in somewhat convincing arguments against “facile” imitative de-nationalizing or “deprovincializing” of historical writing, which risks “importing cultural” models of “internationalization” interpreted today sometimes as “globalization” that is simply Americanization—a not unwarranted suspicion.18 McNeill himself admitted his highly influential Rise of the West was entrenched in “a form of [1960s] intellectual imperialism” trying “to understand global history on the basis of the concept of cultural diffusion developed among American anthropologists in the 1930s.”19 A short prosopographical explanation, then, of why leading historians have taken up worlding’s analytical usefulness is in order.

WHEN IS WORLDING NOT INTERPRETATIVELY INCIDENTAL BUT CRITICAL? Let us rephrase the question, borrowing a felicitous description of historical praxis by one of its best practitioners, Felipe Fernández-Armesto, as “the confrontation of tough problems” with a “respect for the sources, and the quest for the truth.”20 How has world operated as a necessary scalpel to dissect truth, in Fernández-Armesto’s sense of “truth” as “language that matches reality”?21 The best recent answers focus on how changing the spatial zoom on our analytical lenses helps us grasp certain realities better: “[z]ooming in allows you to see things previously invisible; stepping back, widening the lens, has the same effect, although the things you see are different.”22 But before presenting further examples, the ironic twist referred to above concerning historism’s relationship to worlding must be addressed since figuratively (and perhaps, as one film historian hints, literally?)23 zooming in and out was nothing new to Leopold Ranke. The “ideological birthmarks” of the conception of the modern profession of history in the nineteenth century, Eurocentrism and nationalism, were (in the words of Jerry Bentley, my predecessor as editor of the Journal of World History) “the conditions” determining that worlding perspectives somehow remained for many the antithesis of professionalism.24 At their worst, grand scales smacked of superficial surveys,25 equated with writing textbooks since “[i]nterest” in such endeavors “often did not spread from scholarship to teaching but rather the other way around.”26 Certainly, Ranke’s greatest contribution to our method was to teach that one should construct the edifice of historical understanding not by derivatively trusting hearsay chroniclers’ or historians’ accounts but instead, as he explained when founding his Berlin research seminar in 1825, by meticulously building up one’s “own judgment” of “how it really was” (his famous 1824 quip) from archival evidence. At its best this comes in the form

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of non-hearsay testimony in which the fact in question inheres—to borrow an important qualification from the law of evidence—such as the original copy of a treaty. Thus, only Quelle and Urkunde, not Bearbeitung, that is, derivative sources, “proved” things.27 But, as many scholars have noted, “there is no global ‘archive.’”28 It seems impossible to argue against Peer Vries’s observation that “classical standards of professionalism for traditional historians … presuppose intimate knowledge of a confined field with its sources, archives and literature, and the ability to critically analyse one’s primary source material;” and “[t]hese requirements cannot simply be transferred to global history.”29 Jack Goldstone’s recollection that the stellar work of Marshall Hodgson, Philip Curtin, and Robert R. Palmer remained “highly controversial, even if widely admired,” is an accurate description of a fairly widespread attitude.30 Unlike (modern) national histories, world histories appear to suffer from evidential deficiency. But appearances can deceive, and quite ironically in Ranke’s case. To begin with, nothing fetishizes the archive more than imagining the modern nation-state as its Prometheus. And, despite inspiring misguided hypernationalism, Ranke’s method aimed both at evidential reliability (historism) and the documenting of nation-states’ histories as important precisely because of their international role: it was why he attempted to write world history or Weltgeschichte from archives in the first place, the essential Rankean modus operandi of his “scholarly persona,” in Herman Paul’s hermeneutic sense of an influential “repertoire.”31 And his most famous yet rebellious student, Jacob Burckhardt, followed suit. The import of Ranke’s conviction that worlding acts need to find isomorphically worlding interpretations hinges on our appreciation of what he meant when he wrote a note roundabout 1867 (on some copies of archival documents) in which he used a favorite word of his to remind himself that they were useful for investigating “the world-encompassing contrast between the Austrian and Bourbon dynasties [weltumfassenden Gegensatzes der Häuser Österreich und Bourbon].”32 The leitmotiv of Ranke’s semantic drift in using umfassen, to “grasp” or “contain,” to describe how persons meaningfully encompass, embrace, or, indeed, in this case attempt to dominate the world, their world, reminds us of the value of any historian’s parallel efforts to apprehend and encompass the intentions or realities of such claims (possessive or affective). The proposition is that parameters of coherence must be worked out from evidence of results back to contextual causes—here, from texts to intentions—(like Hopkins and Wallerstein’s renowned “commodity chain” method); and that this governs all historical investigations—local, national, regional, or global. The ironic complementarity of Rankean-style hard-evidence investigation and Weltgeschichtliche scope only occasionally surfaces, as in a comment made by FernándezArmesto in a 2007 interview pointing out that the “thrills” of “staring a living worm in the face in the archive” need not be lost in “global history:” I try always to maintain close contact with the sources. I do not start with generalizations but with detail and I build outward from there. What is gained is that you get a far better sense of comparisons and connections. Sometimes when you are working in a very traditional monographic rut, you miss those entirely.33 “Comparisons and connections” have deep resonance in the best of worlding historiography, but the most celebrated explanation of how worlding possesses innovative heuristic and hermeneutic qualities belongs to William McNeill.

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His parable of meta-analytical discovery while a doctoral student is worth quoting at length as we shall return to it when discriminating subjective from substantive and meta-analytical types of worlding: Once upon a time … I went for a stroll in Morningside Park. Below me ran the Henry Hudson Parkway, crowded with cars. When I glanced down at it, to my amazement I observed that the stop-and-go traffic on the Parkway constituted a longitudinal wave, with nodes and anti-nodes spaced at regular intervals … Few if any of the drivers whose behaviour created and sustained the longitudinal wave … were aware of that dimension of their condition. Yet the wave pattern was most certainly there—clear and unambiguous. To recognize it required an observer, located at an appropriate distance, who possessed, ready-made, the notion of longitudinal wave with which to generalize the infinite detail that assailed my eyes as particular cars formed ever-changing geometrical relations to one another. Observer, scale of observation and concept all entered into the act of recognition.34 Such frequent visual metaphors for worlding from above (including Fernández-Armesto’s climbing to a “cosmic crow’s nest”35 or acting like a “galactic museum-keeper”)36 can be linked to twentieth-century space exploration. Paradoxically, however, writes Benjamin Lazier, “for every encounter with wholeness”—“environmental awareness” or global citizenship (so dear to often naively conceived world history pedagogy)37—“there are by definition moments of terrific alienation,” of “vertigo that can well up when Whole Earth comes to mind.”38 Looking up from Fernández-Armesto’s rut instead of down, however, can quell research vertigo. And the first of the benefits Fernández-Armesto listed, comparison, has indeed historically led scholars into worlding their inquiries. As Bloch recommended in 1930, “it is a hundred times true to state that today’s political frontiers are powerless to contain … the great phenomena which form the threads of human history; and it is no less certain that the exact perception of different collectivities is never attained except by constant contrasting.” A rich if controversial tradition demonstrates comparison’s appeal as a heuristic tool that requires worlding one’s approach to evidence (Bloch’s “bon outil comparatif”),39 if not planetarily from a vertigo-prone crow’s nest then at least by peaking out judiciously from one’s evidential rut.40 This comparative looking up and out made European economic historians dominate worlding early on. Many realized after Eric Williams’s landmark Capitalism and Slavery was published in 1944 that certain historical questions had to be worlded to be answered. Gazing upwards and outwards was not a luxury but a necessity in order to appreciate that slave trade abolition in the 1700s and 1800s formed only one segment in a spatially and temporally global sequence leading from early modern “triangular trade,” linking European industrialization with African slave trade and colonial American plantations, to the rise of current development (and underdevelopment). Thinking about Capitalism and Slavery’s claims by way of a recent tripartite typology suggested by Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori can provide us with a tremendously useful compass to navigate the worlding of research, so to speak, by its relevant evidence. Prior to Williams’s investigation, economic comparison of units such as national or regional economies could be studied as unconnected in the evidence—what, adapting the Moyn–Sartori typology, we might term meta-analytical worlding (“the global as a meta-analytical category of the historian”). Williams’s thesis, however, challenged historians to dig deeper into evidence that

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events in Africa, the Americas, and Europe were linked causally, and not just happening at the same time; this constitutes in my view an eminent example of a substantive worlding in a Moyn–Sartori typology (“the global as a substantive scale of historical process”), which has the second benefit of worlding advocated by Fernández-Armesto in his rut metaphor, namely, a new-found ability to see “connections” whose importance may be underestimated by previous historians.41 Intellectual history has yielded particularly good results along these lines, as in the case of the 1814 Norwegian constitution, a textual analysis of which conducted by Kåre Tønneson reveals inspiration and verbatim text drawn from previous French, US, Polish, Batavian, Swedish, and Spanish constitutions, though this points to how the Moyn– Sartori tripartite typology is best thought of as a spectrum of intentionality (to which we shall return).42 The lowest-hanging fruit in adapting the Moyn–Sartori typology, subjective worlding (“the global as a subjective category used by historical agents who are themselves the objects of the historian’s inquiry”)43 can also be located in Williams’s analysis, for his evidence convinced him that “capitalists” consistently calculated their interests globally and “first encouraged West Indian slavery and then helped to destroy it” when it began to prove an economic and hence political “nuisance.”44 Such “development of underdevelopment” thinking spawned the rise of world systems and world-system analysis in the 1960s and 1970s, with sociologists and historians following the interdisciplinary lead, most famously, of Immanuel Wallerstein and André Gunder Frank. In a related economic vein, not Marxian-inspired (necessarily) and less embedded within historical sociology (mostly), a veritable cottage industry arose, which raised comparison of Asian and European development to a high degree of sophistication—the California School of the Great Divergence headed by R. Bin Wong and Kenneth Pomeranz, together responsible for inspiring a flurry of hermeneutic insights concerning the need for “reciprocal comparison.”45 Such research points to the methodological virtue of zooming down, away from nations (Chinese or British) to comparable worlds of production (Yangzi Delta and English Midlands) that were differently linked to resources (the Americas), in order to grasp global industrialization’s history: down from the forest to three types of diversely linked groves, McNeill might have said, to reveal an ecosphere that was precisely but, in a globalized sense, unevenly connected. However, Moyn–Sartori substantive connections, not meta-analytical comparisons motivate most historians venturing into worlded contexts. Alan Strathern is, I think, right in observing that a strict “comparative urge” has limited appeal for most noneconomic historians. Like me, they would probably feel more comfortable with Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s position concerning “the primacy of archival, linguistic and philological expertise” (analogous to a historist preference for studying Moyn–Sartori subjectivity rather than meta-analytical hypotheses) and share his “sceptic[ism] with regard to social science-style model-building.”46 As I observed along these lines in the Journal of World History’s 2014 issue in honor of Jerry Bentley, one could have predicted the worlding of his research by considering how Bentley’s early studies of Renaissance “humanists” living and breathing the spirit of a “cosmopolitan (or international, transnational) Latin” culture logically led him to investigate “historical questions” elsewhere in the world “that spill … over from the local into the regional and international arenas.”47 My own research on law and polity developed over the decades as the archival documents in the nine languages I can read took me to questions concerning the medieval and earlymodern connections between Spain, France, Morocco, Latin America, and northern Europe, and then, most recently, between maritime predation and imperial machinations around

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the globe in the late 1600s. Conscious of Bloch’s injunction to follow analytical problems rather than pre-set geography, my analysis of Habsburg Iberian overseas world encompassing (weltumfassen) revealed coherent evolutions, such as the micro-, meso-, and macro-worlding of Spanishness. Pursued as an early modern ethno-legal metaphor morphing from medieval Castilian pars pro toto bids for all Iberia, it succeeded at a planetary scale to such a degree that for a brief moment in the 1600s even detractors suspected it had made good its claim to be catholic in the original Greek sense of a (solidarious) world—in ways that allowed Protestantpersecuted Irish to settle from Castile to Mexico and the Philippines with few questions being asked,48 but even more substantively and subjectively, in ways brought home to the world by the circulation of the first truly global currency, the “Spanish” silver $. Other historians would no doubt see themselves to a great degree in Jürgen Osterhammel’s description of his work as an “eclectic” “practice” that in seeking to “promot[e] transnational and global approaches of various kinds” nevertheless sits awkwardly with “approaches that should probably be kept apart in theoretical terms.”49 Or they might see their own trajectory aligning with John Darwin’s heuristically driven explanation of how After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire developed as a macro-historical work only once what we have called the Blochian need to find answers overcame his “dazzled” conviction that “only a genius,” like Marshall Hodgson or Fernand Braudel, “could attempt such a thing!” For Darwin’s “original starting point,” asking a question about the modern “‘transfer of sovereignty,’” required working back to previous questions: “it was obvious, on reflection, that to treat the peculiar path of Europe’s expansion as a given, needing no explanation, would, at the least, be a failure of nerve.” So a “series of somewhat grudging enquiries” forced him “back to Tamerlane” in the 1400s, “the last (but abortive) great venture to create a land-based ‘worldempire’ that spanned the whole of Eurasia” and the beginning of “the Europeans’ break-out from their long, cramped confinement in the Far West of Eurasia.”50 The evidence on occasion does not permit us to disregard the complementary theoretical coherence of worlding (subjective especially) and historism. Sometimes, the historical persons we study search for us to place them in the world or a world, their world, like Luigi Pirandello’s 1920 play Six Characters in Search of an Author. So, when I think of the Japanese government officials who published an explanation of the Meiji Constitution in 1889 “explicitly represent[ing]” it “as a “handbook for all,” for the Japanese, for Asians, and for all those around the world involved in the “global circuit of seminal constitutional ideas,”51 I must disagree with Pirandello’s hypothesis that historians are “properly speaking” just describers of reality.52 Our duty is instead—thinking back to something G. K. Chesterton once said—to speak meaningfully for the hundreds of millions of humans who just happen, by accident of history, to be dead.

WORLDING: HISTORIANS’ PROBLEMATIC WELTANSCHAUUNG? Thus the desire to contextualize things well leads historians to explore worlds. But doing so means they also construct worlding narratives to highlight meaningfulness in cultures, civilizations, or periods. This in turn has led to criticism that the worlds described are less representations of reality than distorting constructs. Scholars inspired by postcolonialism, most noticeably by Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe, have mounted sustained attacks on the very idea of a universalizing gaze, pointing out that a historian’s subjective distortion can operate as much in observing the connections we have here called Moyn–Sartori substantive worldings as it can in the same historian

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attempting to reconstruct past persons’ subjective worldings across context- and thus realitydistorting time. At its worst, the accusation of distortion (Stephen Feierman and Vinay Lal) posits that the Weltanschauung of globetrotting Eurocentric historicism masquerades, more consciously than unconsciously, as accurate meta-analytical description of the world. Chakrabarty leaves one feeling that “notions of authentically Indian representations of the past are problematic, as the very definition of history, at least in academic discourse, derives from a European model.”53 Whatever the relative merits of this debate, nevertheless, there are other Weltanschauung essentialisms at play here that have gone unnoticed: not about geocultural units of horizontal difference, like Europe or India, but about vertical ones (if one is permitted the image), about writers writ large as synecdoches for cultures, nations, or Sausurrean systems or worlds of meaning. And because historians, unlike prehistorians, deal in texts, we must pause to assess, even if briefly, how this raises questions about agency and intentionality in worlding. To begin with, consider how worlds of transcultural difference (“Indians,” “British,”) overwhelm worlds of vertical or intracultural difference in Provincializing Europe (historians with their “rules of evidence,” for instance, denying the supernatural causes claimed by “peasants” involved in the 1855 Santal rebellion).54 There is circular irony in Chakrabarty’s admission that, notwithstanding the book’s thesis, he wrote it firmly from within Europe, intellectually speaking, confessing in correspondence with Amitav Ghosh to a very “admittedly-shallow reading of our own traditions [emphasis added],”55 that is, South Asian literary cultures.56 Notwithstanding his pro-postcolonialist rejection of the defeatist “intimate enemy” position,57 Chakrabarty’s mind was worlded elsewhere—not in a geographical but in an intellectual sense—by Marx and Heidegger, not by Qutb al-Din Muhammad Nahrawali (d. 1582) or Muhammad Qasim Hindushah Firishta (fl. 1600s). He deploys systems or worlds of meaningfulness that create vertical distance from most Indians and horizontal proximity with some Europeans—for how many European or Indian peasants understood Marx, Heidegger, Nahrawali, or Firishta?58 As Sanjay Subrahmanyam notes, it is “deeply simplistic and ultimately false” to divide the world into historically minded versus ahistorically minded cultures (except intellectually construed): “in a society such as Castile’s in the sixteenth century [most societies?], there were those who viewed the past historically and others who did not, both groups living side by side within the same cultural complex and producing different texts and narratives.”59 The urge to discover evidence of imbricated worlds of meaningfulness is not a European Weltanschauung (or historians’ penchant), but a common cognitive aspiration of the range of investigations variously labeled transnational, transcultural, intercultural, entangled, histoire croisée, etc.; they share a desire to focus on “phenomena of interconnection” that cross boundaries (“en deçà, au-delà et à travers les frontières”),60 for which I have coined the term transliminal. These are much more appealing as rigorously satisfying a desirable standard of judgment of history as fact-finding than earlier, mostly pedagogy-driven worlding narratives that stressed a necessary coverage of the whole world (see Dunn), or an extreme vision that only globalization was truly global history (see Mazlish). The key heuristic shift such transliminal investigations generally accomplish is a liberation that Sheldon Pollock, Homi Bhabha, Carol Breckenridge, and Dipesh Chakrabarty have called—and here I concur with postcolonial aims—the benefit of being “archivally” instead of ideologically “cosmopolitan”: “what if we were to try to be archivally cosmopolitan and to say, ‘Let’s simply look at the world [I would say research it] across time and space and see how people have thought and acted beyond the local.’”61

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WORLDING AS DISCOVERY OF CONTEXTUAL COHERENCE So far, our exploration has privileged dissecting how historians throw themselves into investigations that lead to discovering subjective, substantive, or meta-analytical worldings à-la-Moyn–Sartori—that is, explicit and intended, or implicit but proven-in-the-evidence, or imposed-by-the-historian but revealing worldings. Numerous monographic studies62 demonstrate that historical worlds can be as “closely bounded in time and space” as national, regional, or microhistorical ones (pace Moore), with no greater dependence than any of them on the “lucky dip” into archives.63 But it is useful to reverse the direction of our gaze: to what degree would the persons whose worlds historians see in their analytical microscopes, or meso- and macroscopes, recognize themselves? Even for subjective and substantive worldings the difficulties are multidimensional in ways rarely observed—in almost every case, for example, when historians mentioned in this chapter have said world, they were not thinking of space in the strict sense but instead of biology: of very large human collectivities, even of all humanity-over-time (one now hears Anthropocene) or beyond hominins, all life-over-time, as in Andrew Shryock and Daniel Lord Smail’s concept of “Deep History” and David Christian’s “Big History.” Getting the right fit between analytical term and real phenomenologies requires careful articulation of reality as lived, of the “contingent arguments for coherence” in humans’ actions, as Kathryn Jane Franklin so discerningly puts it in her study of medieval cosmopolitanism in Western Eurasian inns. And articulating today the contingent coherence of past persons’ worlds faces above all the challenge of surmounting the geographical tyranny imposed on our thinking by the all too easily adopted and yet underquestioned territorial jurisdiction of the modern nationstate. How should we capture, then, in stable and context-transferable analytical terms, the multiple acts of “world-building” in caravanserais and funduqs, “places … at once ‘localities’ in claims for rootedness and cosmologies in claims for universality,” whose spatial-cumbiological-cum-habitus polyvalence was so easily turned into normative social or political synecdoche? How should we unpack the specific eleventh-century polyvalence that inspired a Turkic author to scale the ladder up from the local to the cosmic successfully (and back down again) by turning inns that were dedicated to merchants cultivating their own worlds of trans-polity financial calculations into a religio-political metaphor for how kings should behave—cosmologically—as proper Muslims in this world by being mindful of that world, the eternal world?64 In a hotel’s eternal transience, time and space cohered tellingly. Again, a Moyn–Sartori clarification helps. Instances of subjective worldings abound, when persons in the past literally tell us that they are projecting claims onto the world, like the anti-worldliness of the Anglo-Saxon Boethius or the pro-worldliness of imperialists, whether political (Tamerlane), financial (Augé’s businessmen), or intellectual (McNeill’s Cold War American anthropologists pushing diffusion theory as a global reality—we will come back to such subjective projects masquerading in meta-analytical garb). But, even so, evidence of past humans’ proclaimed furthest-extent meaningful collectivities reveals a great diversity of consciously used collective nouns which may or may not be isomorphic with what a historian calls their world. This presents us with the basic terminological problem histoire croisée scholarship focuses on: matching “historicizing categories” to reality.65 Conscious of the perceptive phrase coined by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, why should we use world and not house or even family, or any of the other large-scale historical self-ascriptive66 “metaphors” humans have “lived by” as meaning-generating strategies to describe these contexts?67

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Historically, Arabic usage preferred “house” as a worlding metaphor, as in the famous distinction between the dār al-ḥarb or “house of war” and the dār al-Islām, often translated as “the world of Islam.” One could adopt instead, analytically, the Chinese court’s famous geometrical logic of “‘inner-outer separation’” in “concentric rectangles,” by which the court was metaphorically placing itself—and not just “China”—at the center/top of an excluding system of cosmic civilization (more intraculturally nuanced than its stereotyping as a dichotomy of Chinese-versus-barbarians would have us believe).68 And over three thousand years ago, Babylonian, Assyrian, Hittite, and Egyptian rulers wrote to each other as Akkadian aḫī, “my brother” or abī “my father,” discursively determined by the operations of a hegemonic family metaphor that made them members of an imagined community at the super-international level.69 This was an extended family cemented by a methodological dynasticism of intermarriages that brought them closer to each other, I would stress, than they were to their subjects—as if Egyptian pharaoh, Hittite queen, and Assyrian king lived semantically together in the inner subjectively worlded rectangle of a Chinese court, with Egyptian, Hittite, and Assyrian commoners safely assigned to ever receding rectangles organized properly and concentrically in the cosmically non-family outside. We would be wrong to dismiss outright the deep historical weight of such vertically differentiating worldings in light of our analysis of Chakrabarty’s over-emphasis of differences in horizontal worldings. The stakes in focusing our world zooms contextually are thus high—for worlds of perception, as we have just seen, can disappear from historical sight even when substantive evidence of them stares us in the face. And it is not just spatial or social parameters like world, house, or family (or nation!) that we have to deal with; even combining space with time correctly is not enough. To convey the fundamental quality of serious historical research, historians invoke contextualization; but, since historians are not chroniclers, putting things in context, as we all know, means not just attaching a date and politonym to an event (“French Revolution, 1789”) but being prepared to offer explanations—to capture something of Bourdieu and Passeron’s original meaning for chronotope as “a shared sense of cohort belonging” (not everyone French experienced the Revolution similarly in 1789).70 Historical contextualizing of a world must therefore be subjected to a standard of professional judgment that assesses the total semiochronotope(s), meaning-in-time-and-space (Braudel would have said “histoire globale”), which “historical agents” had of themselves and of each other. If we miss the mark, then we are at a loss to explain things, to answer the questions which they in fact pose for us, as in the totalizing metaphor Plenty Coups, chief of the Crow Nation, expressed just before he died in 1928: “When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground … After this nothing happened.”71 Plenty Coups’s mnemohistorical feat72 is a warning that the discipline of history should have no simple solution to the problem of matching explanatory context to appropriate subjective, substantive, or meta-analytical metaphors. Even time can die. In thinking about the scale of historical investigations, often misleading self-evident boundaries and commonsensical taxa are something that world, global, or transnational history-writing undoubtedly cannot assume. Excepting meta-analytical comparisons, respecting our duty to meaningful contexts by stressing subjective worlding (explicit claims about the world) or evidence of substantive worlding (connections) means historians are not free to choose the parameters of their investigations—or not mostly free. But certainly the worst semiochronotopic mistake is to telescope the nation back in time when investigating transliminal phenomena. Unfortunately, most History departments continue to be organized around national historical fields—inherited ironically from the global institutionalization of Ranke’s

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Weltgeschichte model—such as Turkish History, or more broadly conceived civilizational or continental labels like European History, with an occasional nod to chronological or thematic worldings like Ancient History or History of Science. The greater the semiochronotopic distance between today’s signifier (“Science,” “Europe,” “Turkey”) and its referent in the past (scholastic scientia? Christendom? Trojan history!) the more our zoom goes out of focus.73 The semantic clash between “American History” and Plenty Coups’s there was nothing after the buffalo went, even if productively pursued as a provocative juxtaposition of Native American and USA historiographies, jars, precisely because Bloch was right: geographic unity can be nothing but chaos. As Duncan Bell explains, what was at stake in Plenty Coups’s statement was not just the fact that worlds are made, but also that they are “taken” and “in a double sense,” as “construed or conceptualized” as well as taken “by force, made and remade in the image and at the behest of others,” as technologies of “imperialism.”74 So, given that docketing such professional taxonomies runs hermeneutic risks, planetary, continental, national, or local scales all sit uneasily in my mind as fixed parameters for doctoral and postgraduate research. The give-and-take contextualization of evidence, as we have seen, requires interpretive and meaning-revealing discovery of semiochronotopic scales (in plural) that oftentimes shift as one investigates an issue. And this is just as true of national histories as it is of histories of worlding, still often misleadingly perceived as necessarily macro-historical approaches that must deal with the whole world all the time.75 Precision and accuracy not being the same thing, it all depends on the nature of the question being asked. A careful investigation can demonstrate, for instance, that the foundation document for global Protestantism, the Convent of Wesel (1569), was not really the “Dutch” nationalist project it has been taken for since the 1600s but a transliminal, internationalist one: historical labeling of contexts that imports modern “linguistic and jurisdictional coherence” into the past distorts past intentions.76 Likewise, it would be accurate to state that I am writing this on planet Earth but meaningless if the question asked by a future historian was By which national jurisdiction’s educational system was this author influenced?—to which the hoped-for answer would require precision, not just accuracy, concerning my “educativeness” (nativeness counting less, I suggest, than education). Proposing a question or tackling a problem, and then allowing evidence to show us the proper parameters, is different from assuming that the self-evident scale of worlding events (or of “national” events for that matter) leads to exclusive types of investigations. Take the recent global pandemic. Whatever else needs establishing in the evidence, there can be no doubt as to the eventual worldliness of Covid-19. But immediately one runs into problems, and not just because nothing big or small is so in some absolute fashion, but also because it is so only in relation to something else, and that something always involves the perspective of the viewer, as Voltaire wittily dissected in his fable Micromégas (in which galactic giants and dwarves visiting humans on earth cannot avoid mutual misinterpretations, incommensurabilities, and untranslatabilities, even when equipped with microscopes).77 It would be convincing to say that the sequence of Covid’s evolution corresponds logically to scales of historical contextualization (Wuhan: regional history; China: national history; globe: worlded history); but does this satisfy all historical questions about it? If we ask Blochian questions (not just chronicle events), sliding scales of semiochronotopic significance concerning worlds of coherence begin to arise. This is particularly true as historical “facts” are never offered up by evidence unsullied by other “facts” surrounding them. The chance to explore things beyond what is immediately relevant is furthermore often quite seductively forthcoming, and not just misleadingly seductive but constructively so.

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What do we all not owe, for instance, to the rambling, unpredictable scale—and resulting historiographical brilliance—of a 1970s book written as a response to a politically savvy woman who challenged her professor boyfriend to stop denying the complexities of his own life as a Christian Palestinian-born, Egyptian-, British-, and United States-educated expert in the novels of Joseph Conrad? What would we not have had the pleasure of understanding about the workings of the world had Edward Said not gone to the extreme of investigating Plenty Coups’s suspicion about worlds being taken? I doubt that it is controversial, for example, to say that an Englishman in India or Egypt in the later nineteenth-century took an interest in those countries that was never far from their status in his mind as British colonies. To say this may seem quite different from saying that all academic knowledge about India and Egypt is somehow tinged and impressed with, violated by, the gross political fact—and yet that is what I am saying in this study of Orientalism [emphasis not added].78 Said’s answer to an important question about modern worlding presented a convincing thesis on a thematically contextualized scale (pace the not inaccurate criticisms of Bernard Lewis). And the rabbit holes he followed were not unproductive: where he came up to the surface, like Fernández-Armesto looking up from a monographic rut, Said’s discovery of meaningful worlds left a legacy of fruitful questions. Answers that consider possible contexts of worlding, whether subjective, substantive, or meta-analytical, do more, then, than just match the epistemic needs of particular historical investigations. Suppose historiographers in the future ask the question: Why were so many research articles published in the early 2020s based on sources on the web? Good answers would pick up on the way two processes that began in different types of histories (epidemiological and technological) and in disparate localities (within China and England) could equally well be studied as less-than-worlding investigations: nevertheless, their convergence in a Covid-determined lack of access to non-electronic locations, archives, and libraries might explain a different reality semiochronotopically contextualized as the history of a global academia (for which this very essay might provide evidence since it was begun in Hawaii before December 2019 using mostly library materials but concluded during a sabbatical in Spain, Germany, Denmark, Belgium, England, and Canada that was cut short by Covid-19). This key insight of a research-driven worlding of history was captured in what I have termed the Rörig-Braudel-Wallerstein thesis: the translingual German-French-English history of how a phrase, world system, referred to large systems of coherence beyond the local, but not necessarily at the planetary scale, Wallerstein’s “world-system” corresponding to Braudel’s previous “économie-monde” and this to a translation of Rörig’s “Weltwirtschaft” as not the world’s economy but an economy that is a world unto itself.79 Analogously worlded research now flourishes outside economic history. Sometimes what is revealed is explicitly subjective, worlded self-ascriptively by the historical agents themselves, as in the consciously globalizing projects of modern telecommunications80 and the creation of global time zones.81 Noteworthy is Marilyn Lake’s discovery of a causal sequence in a global “Anglo-Saxonist” racism linking late 1800s and early 1900s democratic Australia, USA, Britain, and South Africa, which racism was predicated on the use of “literacy

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tests” to exclude non-whites from voting.82 At other times, one senses more substantive than subjective worlding (Kenneth Pike’s etic shading out the emic) as with David Livingstone’s analysis of the distinctly pointillist worlding characteristic of modern scientists’ work—from laboratory to laboratory—which shifted their world substantively away from their physical neighbors, even when they were not subjectively (emically) intending to isolate themselves in an “ivory tower.”83 Importantly, returning to our discussion of intracultural difference’s concurrence with transcultural coherence (in Chakrabarty), this type of investigation illustrates how worlds collide vertically across wide horizontal expanses. For “intimate connections between what we might call ‘location and locution’” demonstrate that the “spaces of everyday social life … are not insulated from the vicissitudes of international exchange”; “People close together physically may be ‘miles apart’ in terms of social distance or cultural space, living, as it were, in totally different worlds.”84 Such high-caliber research raises the analytical bar, challenging us to refine use of metaphors like network or web.85 It draws us away from the idea that world history is either textbook coverage of the planet or a zero-sum foreign opposite of indigenous or national or local history, views still too prevalent among teachers and education policy-makers.86 This pedagogical tendency toward a debased “xenology”87 rests on an enduring “methodological nationalism” which assumes anything worlded must concern a planetary composite of national realities.88 The highly internationalized working worlds of Livingstone’s scientists, however, testify to more important historical questions: for instance, even if they demographically constitute a tiny world group with a common purpose (science resists universal laws with great difficulty, particularly when it comes to understanding Homo sapiens sapiens as a universal species), one could profitably investigate the degree to which scientists semiochronotopically participate at the same time in a differently worlded world of commercial entertainment, created by an equally small demographic group (call it Hollywood) but reaching a globally massive demographic—that is, one could explore the “dialectical” or “dialogical” workings between discrete worldings.89 Such articulations raise methodological and taxonomic issues. Methodologically, historians are clearly less free to choose a world perspective (advisable mostly in meta-analytical comparison) than they are constrained to adopt it when the evidence points to past persons’ subjective or substantive worlding à-la-Rörig-Braudel-Wallerstein. But what do we do with the taxonomic question of precisely naming these worlds meaningfully? Returning to Livingston’s scientists it would seem unsatisfactory to leave things as “the twentieth-century world of global scientists” versus “global TV viewers”—for, even reduced to the question of how such a question might focus on national versus international cultures as taxa, transnational forms of worlding are best interpreted not as antithetical to the nation but as instrumental to its construction.90 What to do taxonomically, then, when famous imperial subjective worldings begin to look unfamiliar? How do we call the world revealed by Greg Woolf’s evidence which disproves “Romans” in the Roman Empire were mostly “actors and provincials objects of domination” and instead proves that, even in the more systematically brutally conquered West, “[t]he new order was not … the rule of the Roman people over barbarians” but rather of “‘new Romans’ recruited from the conquered” over their own compatriots?91 Should we now call this emically transethnic system of cultural coherence (blending Pike, Franklin, and Lakoff and Johnson with Woolf) the New Romans’ Empire?

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Figure 1.1  Gallo-Romain. Reproduced by kind permission of Claude Turier and Éditions Odéum (Aubière, France).

AGENCY AND INTENTIONALITY: A WORLDING HISTORICAL CORRECTIVE Useful as it is, prescient readers will have noticed something our application of the Moyn– Sartori typology has so far left disappointingly under-articulated. After all, subjective and meta-analytical worldings were and are intentional, whereas substantive ones need not be (except on the part of the historians, as we have seen). If those who worlded the Roman “imperium” did so through “tangled webs of agency,” then it is our duty as historians to untangle such crossed purposes and try to sort out how their agencies possessed meaning for them—and others—in the act, and for us, after the act, as fact-finders of the truth.92 In my experience, the most sophisticated strategy for dealing with this problem is Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann’s formulation of histoire croisée as a “research practice”

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that “places emphasis on what, in a self-reflective process, can be generative of meaning.” Historians can work through agency by focusing on the frames of reference to which histoire croisée thinking alerts us.93 Adopted heuristically as an archivally cosmopolitan but historist practice, this reflexivity can work to diagnose diverse agencies, adding to our appreciation of events that world things as more than—in the famous words of John Masefield’s 1926 novel—One Damn Thing after Another. It can help answer the worlding questions Plenty Coups probably dared not pose explicitly to his interviewer in the 1920s but implied: What made the buffalo go away? Or better yet, Who? And Why? It is time to take this matter in hand in two senses. First, our line of reasoning demands it; second, agency touches upon a widespread concern about globalization today, clearly a form of worlding whose effect in making the rich richer and the poor poorer seemingly everywhere troubles more than just Marxist, Marxian, or dependency theory-influenced historians.94 It has prompted the economic historian Bruno Amoroso in Denmark to posit the rise of a dangerously worlding financial “apartheid” and to differentiate it from its antagonist, mondializzazione, the cultivation of a multi-centered mutually worlded global community that does not eradicate difference, either through capital accumulation or homogenization.95 However tantalizing Amoroso’s hypothesis may be, a less economicist intervention by a Parisian specialist of colonial Latin American hydridization will demonstrate the usefulness of the distinction between globalization and mondialization. We will begin here, and now … with you and me pondering together a surprising way to answer Plenty Coups’s questions, even if at a contextual remove from him, by looking at our clothing. The standard of judgment we will apply comes from Serge Gruzinski’s analysis of the manufacture and dissemination of Baroque art in the 1600s, the first artistic style imported by elites around the world, who felt desperate “to affirm their Europeanness.” Its diffusion and intercontinental mobility as consumed object and taught artistic style indicate a partial Europeanization in Asia, Africa, and the Americas (not unaccompanied by reciprocal processes). Analyzed more precisely, the project of cloning Europe in settler colonies particularly—what Alfred Crosby called the Neo-Europes—was a worlding intent on rejecting any interpretation of itself as exotic.96 My own research corroborates this at a different level: the existence of an early modern Spanish global patriotism that eluded today’s anxieties about birthplace nativism since belonging was a collective project of participatory co-recognition, not an individualistic accident of birth97—less ius soli than ius sanguinis (the right conferred by birthplace or geneology, respectively) but even more the ius of loyal service to an Austrian or Habsburg methodological dynasticism.98 Thus the truth that divorced worlded Spanishness from geography lay in the eye of the believer. But back to clothes: how is mondialization relevant to them? Creating “perfect replicas of Iberian Europe” could involve making other worldings invisible in ways perpetuated today. Look at the labels on our clothes, writes Gruzinski, whose brands proudly announce Paris or New York but, even when they state “made in somewhere else,” often hide manufacturing “commodity chains” stretching thousands of kilometers into the world of economic integration, including extraction of raw materials from even further afield and exploitation of global labor market inequalities: The contrast between the conditions of production and the nature of the final product could not be more obvious. Its very appearance makes the interlacing between societies and civilisations, the accumulation of interests and sufferings on which its creation depends, vanish like magic. It is not just the sum total of the work that was necessary that disappears

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in this way—the commodity fetishism of classic Marxian thought—but in equally radical fashion all the types of hybridisations [métissages] of which it is the fruit.99 The plan to efface these realities, “a type of mondialisation which strains to turn its back on the local and on forms of production which reveal other histories,” Gruzinski, like Amoroso, calls globalization. In order to proceed with the last necessary step in the incorporation of agency into worlding historians’ “theoretical operating system” (as Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Christian Moraru have called it in their introduction to this book), we could do worse than to stop and let Gruzinski’s discrimination of globalization as the “more insidious dynamic within the process of Iberian mondialisation” sink in. It was an “irreducible stranger to confronting the new realities [of the New World] and an inventive advocate of an occidental [i.e., Europeanizing] purism.” Expanding on Gruzinski’s insight, such globalization connotes psychological attitudes to which worlding agencies can be specifically attributed, an exercise more precise than the accurate but less precise mapping out of planetary distributions of things originating elsewhere: it uncovers subjective agencies masquerading as substantive worldings. Gruzinski’s explanation exposes the insidiousness of the globalizing magician’s technique (in Baroque art’s case, a magician bent on self-consciously “European” tricks): This dynamic does not confront the changes that nourish Occidentalizing and its resulting hybridizations [retombées métisses] directly, frankly. It constantly limits their effects, defusing worrying repercussions, and blocking developments that might endanger European norms and the hegemony which upholds them … it exploits social forces, actives intellectual and aesthetic automatism.100 Plenty Coups, I think, would have appreciated our determination to investigate how the buffalo did not just disappear but were made to disappear.

PROJECTS VERSUS PROCESSES: HISTOIRE CROISÉE FRAMES OF REFERENCE But to what degree were human intentions in addition to natural agency responsible for the buffalo’s disappearance? Certainly international investments in railroads through the buffalo lands played a role, as did transnational commercial agricultural systems linking prairie farmers to European consumers and industrialization’s dependence on buffalo leather for factory gears. The actions of corporations (capitalism?) and governments dominate the archival record, though the former more opaquely for research purposes. Reasoning out whether such worldings constituted projects or processes (and for whom?), and that some (many? most?) of the former masqueraded as the latter, raises the last point I would like to make, gesturing back to Lake’s analysis of the late 1800s literacy tests. This can now be re-articulated as the slight-of-hand orchestration of a pernicious globalization project— an excluding white racist “dirigiste script”101 whose explicit emphasis on universal literacy, informed citizenship, and democratization no doubt looked to most citizens like an inclusive civilizing process of mondialization. Distinguishing processes from projects, and accurate agencies from more precise intentionalities, is the final theoretical contribution that historians’ investigations of worlding lead me to propose. The idea comes mostly from the history of the global institutionalization

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of academic disciplines, particularly science, mathematics, and medicine, outwards from European and neo-European universities (and downwards! think Chakrabarty and Livingston); but significant inspiration also derives from scholarship that explores how “Europe,” even before the EU, was historically less a place with processes happening than a project of “Europeanization”—on a spectrum whose gradient of instantiation was felt by most living within it as a process, but whose project designers, so to speak, are well known.102 The point is that it is useful to frame worlding historical questions—when assessing the meaningfulness of our (today) and their (past) totalizing parameters—in terms of agency and intentionality; to ponder degrees of their subjectivity versus our substantive or meta-analytical inferences at work in analyzing the evidence of their subjectivity; to ask about consciousness of meaning so that we raise our analysis above “stumbling from process to process,” as Marc Bloch once said,103 or misinterpreting projects like globalization only as processes (i.e., not taking on board the import of what is done to us by others, as Bertolt Brecht observed, if we assume erroneously that all things human are always two-way streets).104 Figure 1.2 sketches a preliminary version of how we might go about sorting out the hermeneutic spectra at stake. Applying these criteria brings into sharper focus what the image of a Gallo-Roman previously given captures so humorously and Woolf’s analysis of the Western Roman Empire so starkly: Romanness may have been the subjective project proclaimed in official labels, but if we call these “Romans’ processes,” we ignore substantive evidence that what happened involved things akin to early modern global Europeanness: globalizing or erasing from the picture Gallification of Romans, and neo-Romans’ intentions. Appending this research sensitivity hones interpretation of, say, the degree to which “waves of globalization”—note the nature metaphor of process—affected dock workers’ solidarity in

Figure 1.2  The hermeneutic spectra of “worlding” acts investigated as historicizable contexts.

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the late 1880s, encouraging us to sort out whose projects were experienced (or accepted) by others as processes. When “sailors and migrants … realized that they were involved in a global activity,” writes one historian, it “made dockers apt to pursue acts of unselfish international solidarity,” so that “[a]s early as during the Great London Dock Strike of 1889, dockers as far away as Australia contributed heavily to the strike fund, helping to bring victory to the London dockers.”105 If we will undoubtedly continue to explore how dockers worlded their world and how the world worlded dockers, there can be no doubt that horologists worlded all of our time between the 1850s and today with standardized global time zones. But even here our reading of Vanessa Ogle’s evidence is enriched by noting how well the project/ process distinction applies to how some resisted the imposition of a perceived imperialist project (a time-space projection of Europe) against time experts’ arguments that time zones merely reflected pre-existing natural processes.106 As a species, we are not disinclined to pull the wool over our own eyes, perhaps especially when dealing with “totalities” like worlding, which seem incommensurable. “One of the ironies of a world order populated by nations,” writes Andre Schmid, “is that claims to particularity,” national particularity vis-à-vis other nations, “are themselves universalized” so that “[t]he very act of possessing uniqueness is universalized: every nation is to have a unique character as part of its claim to nationhood.”107 Modern nationalism usually proposed itself as a project that aimed to create states to recognize officially the results of pre-existing unofficial processes that had already formed the nation itself as a reality (language, “culture,” Volk), even if in most cases members of these putative nations, like Marx’s working class, might need to have their consciousness of its existence raised. Such building of imagined nations—probably less discovered than invented by dirigistes—demands investigation of it as a worlding phenomenon, that is, of the degree to which, among other things, individuals understood, intended, or opposed the ironically homogenizing globalization performed by the nationalism to which Schmid alludes. Interesting issues are thus raised by articulating questions about worlding carefully along the lines schematized in Figure 1.2 from an historical (i.e., fact-finding) perspective. What is offered is not either/or worlding hermeneutics but a spectrum of possible interpretation of past humans’ intended and unintended meaningfulness within the not seamless but definitely endless tapestry of history writ large: it suggests a tool for testing the degree to which specific contexts of worlding may be like the racist project analyzed by Lake, firmly in the top righthand corner, or more like Covid-19, a natural or “physogenic” phenomenon that must be placed in the bottom left-hand corner (since, of course, nature can only figuratively be said to possess historical agency, and establishing its intent is out of the question, for Nature’s Diary is the real global archive that does not exist). When historians look back on Covid-19, like medievalists studying the Black Death, they will no doubt be able to shift the placement of historical answers on a scheme like this, as evidence of physogenic and anthropogenic factors are discovered, of other meaningfully subjective worldings and not just of substantive or meta-analytically worlded projects or processes—perhaps not unlike my admission of a Covid dependence on the electronic shelf for completing this chapter (the electronic shelf itself being a wonderful example of the disjunction between its projected design by a minority of electronics experts and the majority’s experience of it as a passive process of cognitive change). But failure to investigate the project/process distinction can compound mnemohistorical confusions with grave results, like modern Anglo-American criminal trials forgetting that the original “purpose” of the legal principle of “reasonable doubt” in “a vanished premodern Christian world” was not to help

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determine the “standard of proof” for fact-finding “to protect the accused” (assumed by most today to constitute an “impersonal” process offering jurors “psychic distance” and “agency denial”); instead, its express purpose (i.e., the project) was to comfort judges and juries “troubled by moral anxieties” about being damned themselves for spilling others’ blood. Consequently, modern courts today in the Anglo-American “world” dangerously “convict accused persons under a reasonable doubt standard that” even Supreme Court debates admit “we do not understand.”108 Care must be taken, for we are stuck in this hermeneusis;109 there is no returning to a prehistorical scheme in which totally natural processes and totally human projects are either the same or functionally reversed. Still, Jan Assmann’s painstaking reconstruction of the ancient Egyptian “concept of reality” brings home the importance of the proposition. Imagine living in a world in which meaning is a slave to schedule, not perspective or desire: “Egyptians experienced time not as a natural phenomenon past their control but as something to be ritually maintained” because “they were convinced they had to cyclicize time”—make it happen repeatedly—by performing rites correctly.” History in any “linear” sense was “excluded”: in such a world, “events” are meaningless “manifestation[s] of chaos and contingency,” shameful results of mistakes in our only hermeneusis, helping the gods in the scheduled “project of world maintenance.”110 Anthropogenic projects outside natural (cosmic/divine) processes were immaterial, and subjective or meta-analytical judgments could only assess conformity. In such a world, history—the way we have conceived it—is indeed just One Damn Thing After Another but without the Boethian consolation of having historians trying to help us along in our desire to find any meaning at all. “One of the lessons I’ve learned as a writer,” wrote Amitav Ghosh to Chakrabarty in a letter on December 4, 2000, “is that it is hellishly difficult to say anything at all.”111 True; and even more hellish for a historian not to try.

NOTES 1 Also see note 56. The key aspect of historical contextualizing explored in this chapter hinges on the semantic question raised by contrasting “other people’s mouth” with “another person’s mouth” and “another people’s mouths” [shared taste]. 2 Linda Colley, “Writing Constitutions and Writing World History,” in The Prospect of Global History, eds. John Belich, John Darwin, Margret Frenz, and Chris Wickham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 161. 3 See the annotated “World History Research Bibliography” available on my academia.edu and researchgate websites as well as my forthcoming monograph Transliminality in Global, Transnational, and Non-national Histories. 4 “L’unité de lieu n’est que désordre: seul l’unité de problème fait centre.” Marc Bloch, “Une étude régionale: géographie ou histoire?” Annales d’histoire économique et sociale 6 (1934): 81. 5 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Intertwined Histories: Crónica and Tārīkh in the Sixteenth-Century Indian Ocean World,” History and Theory 49 (2010): 120; cf. Carlo Ginzburg, “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method,” History Workshop 9 (1980): 5–36. 6 Pace current debates about their delimitation; Sophie A. de Beaune, Qu’est-ce que la Préhistoire? (Paris: Gallimard, 2016). 7 Alan Strathern, “Global Early Modernity and the Problem of What Came Before,” Past & Present 238 (2018): 334. 8 Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller, “Methodological Nationalism, the Social Sciences, and the Study of Migration: An Essay in Historical Epistemology,” The International Migration Review 37 (2003): 600.

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9 Hervé Inglebert, Le Monde, L’Histoire. Essai sur les histoires universelles (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2014), 9, 97. 10 Marc Augé, Non-lieux: Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité (Paris: La Librairie du XXIe siècle, 1992). 11 J. S. Cardale, ed., King Alfred’s Anglo-Saxon Version of Boethius De Consolatione Philosophiae (London: W. Pickering, 1829), 94–9; paraphrasing Liber 2, Prosa 7. 12 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Aux origines de l’histoire globale; Leçon inaugurale prononcée le jeudi 28 novembre 2013, Collège de France,” books.openedition.org/cdf/156. 13 Bruce Mazlish, “Comparing Global History and World History,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 28 (1998): 385–95. 14 William McNeill, “A Defence of World History: The Prothero Lecture,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 32 (1982): 82–3. 15 Caroline Douki and Philippe Minard, “Histoire globale, histoires connectées: un changement d’échelle historiographique?” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 5 (2007): 10. 16 Mirjan Damaška, Evaluation of Evidence: Premodern and Modern Approaches (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 41. 17 See Stefan Berger, “Historians and Nation-Building in Germany after Reunification,” Past & Present 148 (1995): 188n6. 18 Douki and Minard, “Histoire globale, histoires connectées,” 13. 19 William McNeill, “The Rise of the West after 25 Years,” in The Rise of the West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), xv–xvi. 20 Felipe Fernández-Armesto, “Response to Hochschild,” in Recent Themes on Historians and the Public: Historians in Conversation, ed. Donald A. Yerxa (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), 92. 21 Peer Vries, ‘“I would be flattered to think that anyone saw me as globally broad-minded!” An interview with Felipe Fernández-Armesto,’ Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 20 (2009): 178. 22 David Blackbourn, “‘The Horologe of Time’: Periodization in History,” PMLA 127 (2012): 306. 23 Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1966), comparing Ranke with Louis Daguerre, Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 23. 24 Jerry Bentley, “The Task of World History,” in The Oxford Handbook of World History, ed. Jerry Bentley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3–4. 25 Douglas Northrop, “The Challenge of World History,” in A Companion to World History, ed. Douglas Northrop (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 1. 26 Peer Vries, “Editorial: Global History,” for the Special Issue on “Global History” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 20 (2009): 7. 27 Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 44, 53; for law of evidence, see Damaška, Evaluation of Evidence, 103. 28 John Darwin, paraphrasing Pamela Kyle Crossley, in “Writing Global History (or Trying to),” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 20:2 (2009): 63; cf. Vries, “‘I would be flattered,” 182; and Barbara Weinstein, “The World Is Your Archive? The Challenges of World History as a Field of Research,” in A Companion to World History, ed. Douglas Northrop (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 63–78. 29 Vries, “Editorial: Global History,” 15. 30 Jack Goldstone, “From Sociology and Economics to World History,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 20:2 (2009): 75–6. 31 Herman Paul, “Introduction: Scholarly Personae: What They Are and Why They Matter,” in How to Be a Historian: Scholarly Personae in Historical Studies, 1800–2000, ed. Herman Paul (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), 6. 32 Staatsbibliothek (Berlin), Manuscripts, Ranke Nachlass-Ergänzung, “Dritter Abschnitt” folio-folder cover page (unnumbered), discovered by the chief archivist, Dr. Siegfried Baur, and me in 2018.

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33 Donald A. Yerxa, “On the Global History of Exploration: An Interview with Felipe FernándezArmesto,” in Recent Themes in World History, ed. Donald A. Yerxa (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), 38. 34 McNeill, “A Defence of World History,” 83. 35 Yerxa, “On the Global,” 38. 36 Vries, “‘I would be flattered,” 170–1. 37 Ross Dunn, “The Two World Histories,” Social Education 72 (2008): 257–63. 38 Benjamin Lazier, “Earthrise; or, The Globalization of the World Picture,” American Historical Review 116 (2011): 630. 39 Marc Bloch, “Un centre d’études en développement: l’Institut pour l’Étude comparative des Civilisations, à Oslo,” Annales d’histoire économique et sociale 2 (1930): 84–5. 40 See Matthias Middell, “Kulturtransfer und Historische Komparatistik—Thesen zu ihren Verhältnis,” Comparativ 1 (2000): 7–41; Jürgen Kocka and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, eds., Comparative and Transnational History: Central European Approaches and New Perspectives (New York: Berghahn, 2012); Philippa Levine, “Is Comparative History Possible?” History and Theory 53 (2014): 331–47. 41 Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, “Approaches to Global Intellectual History,” in Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, eds., Global Intellectual History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 5. 42 Colley, “Writing Constitutions and Writing World History,” 164. 43 Moyn and Sartori, “Approaches to Global Intellectual History,” 5. 44 Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 169. 45 Jonathan Burton, “The Shah’s Two Ambassadors: The Travels of the Three English Brothers and the Global Early Modern,” in Emissaries in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Mediation, Transmission, Traffic, 1550–1700, eds. Brinda Charry and Gitanjali Shahani (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 28n18. 46 Strathern, “Global Early Modernity,” 327. 47 Fabio López Lázaro, “Editorial Introduction: A Festschrift for Jerry Bentley,” Journal of World History 25 (2014): 461. 48 Fabio López Lázaro, “Labour Disputes, Ethnic Quarrels and Early Modern Piracy: A Mixed Hispano-Anglo-Dutch Squadron and the Causes of Captain Every’s 1694 Mutiny,” International Journal of Maritime History 22 (2010): 73–111. 49 Jürgen Osterhammel, “Global History in a National Context: The Case of Germany,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 20:2 (2009): 42. 50 Darwin, “Writing Global History,” 65–7. 51 Colley, “Writing Constitutions and Writing World History,” 175. 52 Luigi Pirandello, “Come e perchè ho scritto i ‘Sei personaggi in cerca di autore,’” Comœdia 7 (1925): 6. 53 Stefan Berger, “Introduction: Towards a Global History of National Historiographies,” in Writing the Nation: A Global Perspective, ed. Stefan Berger (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 2. 54 Amitav Ghosh and Dipesh Chakrabarty, “A Correspondence on Provincializing Europe,” Radical History Review 83 (2002): 172n3. 55 Ibid., 164. 56 Chakrabarty’s indictment is general: “a lot of what we—scholars who write in English—say about these [Indian] traditions is a bundle of unexamined assumptions and assertions based on a knowledge on [sic] of these traditions that, textually speaking, is scanty. It amounts to what in Bangla we call ‘porer mukhe jhal khaowa’ [to taste the taste of chili from other people’s mouths];” ibid., 163. 57 Ibid., 170. 58 Subrahmanyam, “Intertwined Histories,” 138–43; cf. O’Brien, 23. 59 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “On World Historians in the Sixteenth Century,” Representations 91 (2005): 28.

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60 Joëlle Droux and Rita Hofstetter, “Introduction. Perspective sur la fabrique globalisée des savoirs et des politiques dans le champ éducatif,” in J. Droux and R. Hofstetter, eds., Globalisation des mondes de l’éducation. Circulations, connexions, réfractions, XIXe et XXe siècles (Rennes: Presses Universitaires, 2015), 7. 61 Sheldon Pollock, Homi Bhabha, Carol Breckenridge, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Cosmopolitanisms,” Public Culture 12 (2000): 585–6. 62 I indicate these in my “World History Research Bibliography” with the mathematical theory symbol for intersection: ∩ (see note 3). 63 Robert Moore, “A Global Middle Ages?” in The Prospect of Global History, eds. John Belich, John Darwin, Margret Frenz, and Chris Wickham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 88. 64 Yūsuf Khāṣṣ Ḥājib: “The world is an inn, and you are as it were a caravan: how many days does the caravan stop at the inn? This is a caravanserai, a place of earnings: whatever you gain here, consign it there. Send ahead the baggage train, for you will soon resume the journey … ” quoted by Kathryn Jane Franklin, “This World Is an Inn:” Cosmopolitanism and Caravan Trade in Late Medieval Armenia (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2014), 20; and 40, 37. 65 Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, “Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity,” History and Theory 45 (2006): 44ff. 66 With the meaning deployed in Fabio López Lázaro, “The Rise and Global Significance of the First ‘West:’ The Medieval Islamic Maghrib,” Journal of World History 24 (2013), passim; especially 270. 67 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 68 Marshall Sahlins, “Cosmologies of Capitalism: The Trans-Pacific Sector of ‘The World System,’” Proceedings of the British Academy 74 (1988): 25. 69 Raymond Cohen and Raymond Westerbrook, eds., Amarna Diplomacy: The Beginnings of International Relations (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 18. 70 Jan Blommaert, “Chronotopic identities,” Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies 144 (2015): 1. 71 See Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 1–7. 72 In Jan Assmann’s sense of “Rather than asking, ‘What really happened?’ the mnemohistorical approach asks how it was remembered,” The Invention of Religion: Faith and Covenant in the Book of Exodus (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 34. 73 Bernard Wailes and Amy Zoll, “Civilization, Barbarism, and Nationalism in European Archaeology,” in Nationalism, Politics, and the Practice of Archaeology, eds. Philip Kohl and Clare Fawcett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 21–38. 74 Duncan Bell, “Making and Taking Worlds,” in Global Intellectual History, eds. Moyn and Sartori (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 261. 75 Cf. Kenneth Pomeranz, “Histories for a Less National Age,” American Historical Review 119 (2014): 2. 76 Fabio López Lázaro, “Review: Jesse Spohnholz, The Convent of Wesel: The Event That Never Was and the Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017),” Sixteenth Century Journal 50 (2019): 574. 77 Voltaire, Micromégas. Ingénu (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), 31. I am grateful to Carolyn Biltoft for this reference. 78 Edward Said, Orientalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), 11. 79 López Lázaro, “A Festschrift,” 467. 80 Dwayne Winseck and Robert Pike, Communication and Empire: Media, Markets, and Globalization, 1860–1930 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 81 Vanessa Ogle, “Whose Time Is It? The Pluralization of Time and the Global Condition, 1870s-1940s,” American Historical Review 118 (2013): 1376–1402.

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82 Marilyn Lake, “From Mississippi to Melbourne via Natal: the Invention of the Literacy Test as a Technology of Racial Exclusion,” in Connected Worlds, eds. Ann Courthoys and Marilyn Lake (Canberra: ANU Press, 2005), 209–29. 83 Sticking to his classic definition: “emic systems” and their “emic units … are in some sense to be discovered by the analyst, not created by him … Etic systems, on the other hand, are assumed to be classifications created by the analyst,” Kenneth Pike, Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior (The Hague: Mouton, 1967), 55. 84 David Livingstone, Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 6–7. 85 Cátia Antunes, “A história da análise de redes e a análise de redes em história,” História. Revista da FLUP Porto, IV Série 2 (2012): 11–22. 86 Dunn, “The Two World Histories,” 257–63; Weiwei Zhang, “The World from China,” in A Companion to World History, ed. Douglas Northrop (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 405–17; and Luo Xu, “Reconstructing World History in the People’s Republic of China since the 1980s,” Journal of World History 18 (2007): 325–50. 87 Subrahmanyam, “Aux origines de l’histoire globale,” ¶ 7. 88 Wimmer and Schiller, “Methodological Nationalism,” 579–82. 89 For example, Hamid Dabashi, Persophilia: Persian Culture on the Global Scene (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 202–5. 90 A point made most compellingly by Ian Tyrrell, “Reflections on the Transnational Turn in United States History: Theory and Practice,” Journal of Global History 4 (2009): 453–74; and Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 91 Greg Woolf, “The Rulers Ruled,” in Reconsidering Roman Power: Roman, Greek, Jewish and Christian Perceptions and Reactions, ed. Katell Berthelot (online edition: Rome: Publications de l’École française de Rome, 2020, https://books.openedition.org/efr/4773), 6–9. 92 Woolf, “The Rulers Ruled,” 9. 93 Werner and Zimmermann, “Beyond Comparison,” 31–2. 94 Marco Ferrari, “Globalizzazione contro mondializzazione,” COIS Rivista, May 22, 2008 (http:// www.coisrivista.it/index.php/globalizzazione-contro-mondializzazione/). 95 Bruno Amoroso, L’apartheid globale. Globalizzazione, marginalizzazione economica, destablilizzazione politica (Rome: Castelvecchi, 1999). 96 Serge Gruzinski, Les Quatre Parties du monde. Histoire d’une mondialisation (Paris: La Martinière, 2004), 22, 94, 123, 283, 271–311, 352. 97 Fabio López Lázaro, The Misfortunes of Alonso Ramírez: The True Adventures of a Spanish American with Seventeenth-Century Pirates (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 11–14, 82–5: I could have just as accurately used the phrase American Spaniard, though, semiochronotopically, Ramírez would have recognized himself more in the simple term español. 98 Diego Acosta, The National versus the Foreigner in South America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 1–59. 99 Gruzinski, Les Quatre Parties du monde, 371. 100 Ibid., 373. 101 Colley, “Writing Constitutions and Writing World History,” 168. 102 Most Notably, Elisabeth Crawford, Terry Shinn, and Sverker Sörlin, eds., Denationalizing Science: The Contexts of International Scientific Practice (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993); Karen Hunger Parshall and Adrian C. Rice, eds., Mathematics Unbound: The Evolution of an International Mathematical Research Community, 1800–1945 (Providence: The American Mathematical Society, 2002); Catherine Evtuhov and Stephen Kotkin, eds., The Cultural Gradient: The Transmission of Ideas in Europe, 1789–1991 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); and Kiran Klaus Patel, ed., European Integration and the Atlantic Community in the 1980s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

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103 Blackbourn, “‘The Horologe of Time,’” 301. 104 Rubén Gallo, “Modernism and the New Global Imaginary. A Tale of Two Modernisms: From Latin America to Europe and Back Again,” The Cambridge History of Modernism, ed. Vincent Sherry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 261. 105 Lex Heerma van Voss, “‘Nothing to Lose but a Harsh and Miserable Life Here on Earth’: Dock Work as a Global Occupation, 1790–1970,” in Global Labour History: A State of the Art, ed. Jan Lucassen (Bern: Peter Lang, 2006), 596. 106 Ogle, “Whose Time Is It?” 1384. 107 Andre Schmid, Korea between Two Empires 1895–1919 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 5. 108 James Q. Whitman, The Origins of Reasonable Doubt: Theological Roots of the Criminal Trial (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 1–3, 7, 11, 13, 17. 109 In the sense of the “self-perception and interpretation” that makes the “world tolerable,” cf. Ari Z. Bryen, Violence in Roman Egypt: A Study in Legal Interpretation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 4, 203. 110 Jan Assmann, Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel, and the Rise of Monotheism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), 18, 22–7. 111 Ghosh and Chakrabarty, “A Correspondence,” 168.

WORKS CITED Acosta, Diego. The National versus the Foreigner in South America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Amoroso, Bruno. L’apartheid globale. Globalizzazione, marginalizzazione economica, destablilizzazione politica. Rome: Castelvecchi, 1999. Antunes, Cátia. “A história da análise de redes e análise de redes em história.” História: Revista da FLUP Porto. IV Série 2 (2012): 11–22. Assmann, Jan. Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel, and the Rise of Monotheism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008. Assmann, Jan. The Invention of Religion: Faith and Covenant in the Book of Exodus. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. Augé, Marc. Non-lieux: Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité. Paris: La Librairie du XXIe siècle, 1992. Beaune, Sophie A. de. Qu’est-ce que la Préhistoire? Paris: Gallimard, 2016. Bell, Duncan. “Making and Taking Worlds.” In Global Intellectual History. Eds. Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. 254–79. Bentley, Jerry. “The Task of World History.” In The Oxford Handbook of World History. Ed. Jerry Bentley. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. 1–16. Berger, Stefan. “Historians and Nation-Building in Germany after Reunification.” Past & Present 148 (1995): 187–222. Berger, Stefan. “Introduction: Towards a Global History of National Historiographies.” In Writing the Nation: A Global Perspective. Ed. Stefan Berger. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 1–29. Blackbourn, David. “‘The Horologe of Time’: Periodization in History.” PMLA 127 (2012): 301–7. Bloch, Marc. “Un centre d’études en développement: l’Institut pour l’Étude comparative des Civilisations, à Oslo.” Annales d’histoire économique et sociale 2 (1930): 83–5. Bloch, Marc. “Une étude régionale: géographie ou histoire?” Annales d’histoire économique et sociale 6 (1934): 81–5. Blommaert, Jan. “Chronotopic identities.” Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies. Paper 144. Tilburg: Tilburg University, 2015. Bryen, Ari Z. Violence in Roman Egypt: A Study in Legal Interpretation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.

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Burke, Peter. Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. Burton, Jonathan. “The Shah’s Two Ambassadors: The Travels of the Three English Brothers and the Global Early Modern.” In Emissaries in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Mediation, Transmission, Traffic, 1550-1700. Eds. Brinda Charry and Gitanjali Shahani. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. 23–40. Cardale, J. S., ed. King Alfred’s Anglo-Saxon Version of Boethius De Consolatione Philosophiae. London: W. Pickering, 1829. Christian, David. Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Cohen, Raymond, and Raymond Westerbrook, eds. Amarna Diplomacy: The Beginnings of International Relations. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Colley, Linda. “Writing Constitutions and Writing World History.” In The Prospect of Global History. Eds. John Belich, John Darwin, Margret Frenz, and Chris Wickham. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 160–77. Crawford, Elisabeth, Terry Shinn, and Sverker Sörlin, eds. Denationalizing Science: The Contexts of International Scientific Practice. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993. Dabashi, Hamid. Persophilia: Persian Culture on the Global Scene. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Damaška, Mirjan. Evaluation of Evidence: Premodern and Modern Approaches. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Darwin, John. “Writing Global History (or Trying to).” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 20 (2009): 59–74. Douki, Caroline, and Philippe Minard. “Histoire globale, histoires connectées: un changement d’échelle historiographique?” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 54 (2007): 7–21. Droux, Joëlle, and Rita Hofstetter, eds. Globalisation des mondes de l’éducation. Circulations, connexions, réfractions, XIXe et XXe siècles. Rennes: Presses Universitaires, 2015. Dunn, Ross. “The Two World Histories.” Social Education 72 (2008): 257–63. Evtuhov, Catherine, and Stephen Kotkin, eds. The Cultural Gradient: The Transmission of Ideas in Europe, 1789-1991. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. Feierman, Steven. “African Histories and the Dissolution of World History.” In Africa and the Discipline: The Contributions of Research in Africa to Social Sciences and Humanities. Eds. Robert Bates, V. Y. Mudimbe, and Jean O’Barr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. 167–212. Fernández-Armesto, Felipe. “Response to Hochschild.” In Recent Themes on Historians and the Public: Historians in Conversation. Ed. Donald A. Yerxa. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009. 91–3. Ferrari, Marco. “Globalizzazione contro mondializzazione.” COIS Rivista May 22, 2008. http://www. coisrivista.it/index.php/globalizzazione-contro-mondializzazione. Franklin, Kathryn Jane. “This World Is an Inn:” Cosmopolitanism and Caravan Trade in Late Medieval Armenia. PhD dissertation. University of Chicago, 2014. Gallo, Rubén. “Modernism and the New Global Imaginary. A Tale of Two Modernisms: From Latin America to Europe and Back Again.” In The Cambridge History of Modernism. Ed. Vincent Sherry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 250–68. Ghosh, Amitav, and Dipesh Chakrabarty. “A Correspondence on Provincializing Europe.” Radical History Review 83 (2002): 146–72. Ginzburg, Carlo. “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method.” History Workshop 9 (1980): 5–36. Goldstone, Jack. “From Sociology and Economics to World History.” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 20 (2009): 75–90. Grafton, Anthony. The Footnote: A Curious History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Gruzinski, Serge. Les Quatre Parties du monde. Histoire d’une mondialisation. Paris: La Martinière, 2004. Hopkins, Terence, and Immanuel Wallerstein. “Commodity Chains in the World-Economy Prior to 1800.” Review 10 (1986): 157–70. Inglebert, Hervé. Le Monde, l’Histoire: Essai sur les histoires universelles. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2014.

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Kocka, Jürgen, and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, eds. Comparative and Transnational History: Central European Approaches and New Perspectives. New York: Berghahn, 2012. Lake, Marilyn. “From Mississippi to Melbourne via Natal: The Invention of the Literacy Test as a Technology of Racial Exclusion.” In Connected Worlds. Eds. Ann Courthoys and Marilyn Lake. Canberra: ANU Press, 2005. 209–29. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Lal, Vinay. “Provincializing the West: World History from the Perspective of Indian History.” In Writing World History 1800-2000. Eds. Benedikt Stuchtey and Eckhardt Fuchs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. 271–89. Lazier, Benjamin. “Earthrise; or, The Globalization of the World Picture.” American Historical Review 116 (2011): 602–30. Lear, Jonathan. Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Levine, Philippa. “Is Comparative History Possible?” History and Theory 53 (2014): 331–47. Livingstone, David. Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. López Lázaro, Fabio. “Editorial Introduction: A Festschrift for Jerry Bentley.” Journal of World History 25 (2014): 459–73. López Lázaro, Fabio. “Labour Disputes, Ethnic Quarrels and Early Modern Piracy: A Mixed HispanoAnglo-Dutch Squadron and the Causes of Captain Every’s 1694 Mutiny.” International Journal of Maritime History 22 (2010): 73–111. López Lázaro, Fabio. The Misfortunes of Alonso Ramírez: The True Adventures of a Spanish American with Seventeenth-Century Pirates. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011. López Lázaro, Fabio. “Review: Jesse Spohnholz, The Convent of Wesel: The Event that Never was and the Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).” Sixteenth Century Journal 50 (2019): 572–76. López Lázaro, Fabio. “The Rise and Global Significance of the First ‘West’: The Medieval Islamic Maghrib.” Journal of World History 24 (2013): 259–307. López Lázaro, Fabio. “Transliminal Comparisons: Medieval and Early Modern Convivencia and Disvivencia in the Tombstone Inscriptions of Muslim and Christian Rulers.” In Comparing Muslim Societies. Ed. Eric Tagliacozzo and David Powers. Forthcoming. López Lázaro, Fabio. Transliminality in Global, Transnational, and Non-national Histories. Forthcoming. Mazlish, Bruce. “Comparing Global History and World History.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 28 (1998): 385–95. McNeill, William. “A Defence of World History: The Prothero Lecture.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 32 (1982): 75–89. McNeill, William. “The Rise of the West after 25 Years.” In The Rise of the West. Ed. William McNeill. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. xv–xxx. Middell, Matthias. “Kulturtransfer und Historische Komparatistik—Thesen zu ihren Verhältnis.” Comparativ 1 (2000): 7–41. Moore, Robert. “A Global Middle Ages?” In The Prospect of Global History. Eds. John Belich, John Darwin, Margret Frenz, and Chris Wickham. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 80–92. Moyn, Samuel, and Andrew Sartori. “Approaches to Global Intellectual History.” In Global Intellectual History. Eds. Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. 3–30. Northrop, Douglas “The Challenge of World History.” In A Companion to World History. Ed. Douglas Northrop. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 1–12. Ogle, Vanessa. “Whose Time Is It? The Pluralization of Time and the Global Condition, 1870s-1940s.” American Historical Review 118 (2013): 1376–1402. Osterhammel, Jürgen. “Global History in a National Context: The Case of Germany.” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 20.2 (2009): 40–58. Parshall, Karen Hunger, and Adrian C. Rice, eds. Mathematics Unbound: The Evolution of an International Mathematical Research Community, 1800-1945. Providence: The American Mathematical Society, 2002.

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Patel, Kiran Klaus, ed. European Integration and the Atlantic Community in the 1980s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Paul, Herman. “Introduction: Scholarly Personae: What They Are and Why They Matter.” In How to Be a Historian: Scholarly Personae in Historical Studies, 1800-2000. Ed. Herman Paul. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019. 1–14. Pike, Kenneth. Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior. The Hague: Mouton, 1967. Pirandello, Luigi. “Come e perchè ho scritto i ‘Sei personaggi in cerca di autore.’” Comœdia 7 (1925): 5–10. Pollock, Sheldon, Homi Bhabha, Carol Breckenridge, and Dipesh Chakrabarty. “Cosmopolitanisms.” Public Culture 12 (200): 577–89. Pomeranz, Kenneth. “Histories for a Less National Age.” American Historical Review 119 (2014): 1–22. Sahlins, Marshall. “Cosmologies of Capitalism: The Trans-Pacific Sector of ‘The World System.’” Proceedings of the British Academy 74 (1988): 1–51. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978. Schmid, Andre. Korea between Empires, 1895-1919. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Shryock, Andrew, and Daniel Lord Smail. Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Sluga, Glenda. Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Strathern, Alan. “Global Early Modernity and the Problem of What Came Before.” Past & Present 238 (2018): 317–44. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. “Aux origines de l’histoire globale; Leçon inaugurale prononcée le jeudi 28 novembre 2013, Collège de France.” books.openedition.org/cdf/156. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. “Intertwined Histories: Crónica and Tārīkh in the Sixteenth-Century Indian Ocean World.” History and Theory 49 (2010): 118–45. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. “On World Historians in the Sixteenth Century.” Representations 91 (2005): 26–57. Tyrrell, Ian. “Reflections on the Transnational Turn in United States History: Theory and Practice.” Journal of Global History 4 (2009): 453–74. Voltaire. Micromégas. Ingénu. Paris: Gallimard, 2002. Voss, Lex Heerma van. “‘Nothing to Lose but a Harsh and Miserable Life Here on Earth’: Dock Work as a Global Occupation, 1790-1970.” In Global Labour History: A State of the Art. Ed. Jan Lucassen. Bern: Peter Lang, 2006. 591–621. Vries, Peer. “Editorial: Global History.” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 20 (2009): 5–21. Vries, Peer. “‘I would be flattered to think that anyone saw me as globally broad-minded!’ An Interview with Felipe Fernández-Armesto.” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 20 (2009): 170–83. Wailes, Bernard, and Amy Zoll. “Civilization, Barbarism, and Nationalism in European Archaeology.” In Nationalism, Politics, and the Practice of Archaeology. Eds. Philip Kohl and Clare Fawcett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 21–38. Weinstein, Barbara. “The World Is Your Archive? The Challenges of World History as a Field of Research.” In A Companion to World History. Ed. Douglas Northrop. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 63–78. Werner, Michael, and Bénédicte Zimmermann. “Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity.” History and Theory 45 (2006): 30–50. Whitman, James Q. The Origins of Reasonable Doubt: Theological Roots of the Criminal Trial. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. Wimmer, Andreas, and Nina Glick Schiller. “Methodological Nationalism, the Social Sciences, and the Study of Migration: An Essay in Historical Epistemology.” The International Migration Review 37 (2003): 576–610. Winseck, Dwayne, and Robert Pike. Communication and Empire: Media, Markets, and Globalization, 1860-1930. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.

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Woolf, Greg. “The Rulers Ruled.” In Reconsidering Roman Power: Roman, Greek, Jewish and Christian Perceptions and Reactions. Ed. Katell Berthelot. Rome: Publications de l’École française de Rome, 2020. Online edition: https://books.openedition.org/efr/4773. Yerxa, Donald A. “On the Global History of Exploration: An Interview with Felipe FernándezArmesto.” In Recent Themes in World History and the History of the West: Historians in Conversation. Ed. Donald A. Yerxa. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009. 37–45. Xu, Luo. “Reconstructing World History in the People’s Republic of China since the 1980s.” Journal of World History 18 (2007): 325–50. Zhang, Weiwei. “The World from China.” In A Companion to World History. Ed. Douglas Northrop. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 405–17.

CHAPTER TWO

Worlding Philosophy BRIAN O’KEEFFE

“Worlding” implies relinquishing parochialism, heading toward the wider world, and borrowing a vehicle of some sort. For philosophy, one conveyance would be writing: philosophers write texts, and—assuming a well-networked publisher—those texts will circulate and find readers wherever they end up. Recall The Phaedrus, however: “Once a thing is put into writing, the composition … drifts all over the place, getting into the hands not only of those who understand it, but equally of those who have no business with it; it doesn’t know how to address the right people, and not address the wrong.”1 Socrates’s mistrust of writing is notorious. He fears drift, errancy, and unforeseen addressees. Once philosophy sends its messages, publishes its texts, or presses “send” on its emails, it prefers that they’re received by those whose business it is to read philosophy—the “right people.” But, as Jacques Derrida observed, using a postal metaphor, letters can get lost in the mail, or end up in the wrong mailbox, and find themselves opened (albeit not necessarily read) by the “wrong people”—not philosophers, but psychoanalysts, for instance. Derrida himself is Socrates’s nightmare: he philosophizes on the back of a postcard, and, as in Counterpath, the exchange between himself and Catherine Malabou, those cartes postales proliferate widely—they’re sent from Istanbul, Porto, Athens, and so on. This isn’t how one should do philosophy. One shouldn’t foment dissemination, or “destinerrance,” or subject philosophy’s missives to the vagaries of the postal service, or cavalierly induce them to travel toward destinations (if they be destinations at all) philosophy hasn’t anticipated. Philosophy prefers to send its messages more safely than that. But perhaps philosophy needs to risk a bit of insecurity if it wishes to “world” itself more widely. Philosophy needs a nudge to get it out of the door and out on adventures, expeditions, or odysseys. But where, in the world, did Derrida end up? One place was China. At lunch during a lecture tour, Derrida apparently said, “China does not have any philosophy, only thought.”2 A poor way to repay his hosts’ hospitality, surely: how dare he insinuate China is incapable of philosophy? Unfortunately, we don’t have Derrida’s original French (it has several options for expressing “only”), so something was probably lost in translation. But perhaps Derrida was paying his hosts a (backhanded) compliment: perhaps Western philosophy is only capable of “philosophy” because it’s straightjacketed by its adherence to philosophia—to philosophy’s Greek determinations. Perhaps Western philosophy’s remit for thinking is limited thereby. Or else it isn’t a matter of limited thinking—it might not be thought at all. Possibly, opportunities for thought lie beyond the West, beyond philosophy’s Greco-centric domain. Possibly, therefore, in China. In the Greco-centric West, there is but philosophy, only philosophy. Except that it was a Western philosopher, namely Heidegger, who asked, “What Calls for Thinking?” That essay is a graceful account concerning what “calls” us to thinking. If Derrida was alluding to that text, as if relaying Heidegger to his hosts (and reengaging with

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Heidegger’s own dialogue with China), Derrida might have been wondering, there and then, at lunch, whether what calls anyone to thinking is a host’s hospitality. Is being shown hospitality the very circumstance of a call to thinking? Wouldn’t that already be the occasion of philosophical worlding: when one is called to think, wherever one is, and risks insulting (or complimenting) the host by thinking otherwise about what philosophy can be, elsewhere in the world, when it’s not circumscribed by Greece, or Europe? When Hannah Arendt took up Heidegger’s question, in The Life of the Mind, she raised another matter for philosophy’s worlding, asking: “Where Are We When We Think?” At a crossroads or an impasse? At the confluence of rivers or musing, like Derrida and Deleuze, on deserts and desert islands? Living in a city or dwelling, like Heidegger, in a Bavarian hut? Huddled in insular solitude like Rousseau or forced abroad like Arendt herself? Land-locked like Kant (even as he lived in the seaport of Königsberg) or embarked on what Foucault called the ultimate heterotopia, namely a seafaring ship? If Derrida’s question was whether philosophy will always have been Greek, then the sea at issue might always have been the Mediterranean. Will philosophy have never left that apparently closed sea, as if circuiting, like Odysseus, around its shores but always with the home of “Ithaca” (and a certain “Penelope”) in view? Is its privileged sea-within-a-sea the Aegean, the sea that hosts the islands Heidegger describes visiting in his essay “Zu den Inseln der Ägäis” while reading Hölderlin’s poem “The Archipelago”? Has philosophy ever risked the oceans stretching beyond the philosophical “Mediterranean”? It’s a bit fanciful to imagine press-ganging Kant and Heidegger into joining a seafaring crew so that they embark on a proper maritime voyage and even more fanciful the notion that they kill time during the trip by reading not Hölderlin but Joseph Conrad (Lord Jim?). Fancy aside, the serious matter remains with philosophy’s identity as philosophia. At issue, moreover, is whether the only true philosophical language is Greek—and whether, therefore, philosophy implies a monolanguage, only ever enounces, whether in translation or not, whatever can be expressed by logos. So is the matter of philosophical worlding a matter of furthering the spread of philosophia? A worlding of that Greek monolanguage, and its attendant logos, so that wherever one is in the world doing philosophy, one is always doing so in obeisance to philosophia?

PHILOSOPHY IN TRANSLATION Perhaps philosophy worlds itself by traveling in an idiom reserved for it alone. An idiom that survives or even ignores the perils of translation—a world or universal language. Or else it travels thanks to an ideal translation, such that whatever philosophy sends from one shore always arrives intact at the farther shore. Translation, then, would be an aspect of philosophy’s worlding and indeed give philosophy a name for the world itself: “Babel.” Imagine Babel not as a vertical tower but as a horizontal spread of languages across and around the world: translation would therefore be a way of traveling the world and coming to understand it better. Philosophy, inasmuch as it presumably wishes to better understand the world, might wish to embrace the world’s Babelic diversity by undertaking the task of a translator. But translation is a dangerous topic for philosophy. An illustration of the dangers is provided by the entry “To Translate” in Barbara Cassin’s Dictionary of Untranslatables. That entry is captioned by a welter of not-quite-equivalent terms: hermênuein, metaballein, metapherein, traducere, übersetzen, übertragen, and to translate. Moreover, the reader is referred to other entries: “language,” “analogy,” “trope,” and “mimesis,” among others. Such

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referrals evidently plunge a reader—or philosophy—into a situation of abyssal complexity or else down Alice’s rabbit hole (at the bottom, if philosophy were pursuing the topic of translation via the topic of mimesis, then philosophy might discover itself translated into literature or reengaging with the quarrel between itself and literature Plato declared already “old” in The Republic). For philosophy to produce a dictionnaire raisonné of its concepts, a kernel meaning or invariant sense must be possible so that a dictionary’s classificatory systems don’t run out of control, so that the definitional stability desired for one concept is not ruined by referral to virtually every other entry in the same dictionary. Whether translation (even if it comes under “T”) permits that stability, however, is moot. Whence the interest of a dictionary devoted to “untranslatables”: the entry “To Translate” is a mise-en-abyme of the difficulties to be faced—definitional instability, an unruliness that outflanks untranslatability by permitting translations and transpositions (for instance, translation translated into mimesis) that threaten to destabilize the very project of a philosophical dictionary or lexicon. Nonetheless, there is “the generally accepted sense of ‘passing from one language to another.’”3 But what language, at least for philosophy, comes first before translation operates that “passing”? Greek, of course. The first subsection of the entry is entitled “Greek Monolingualism”: “One needs at least two languages in order to translate. But the Greeks … were ‘proudly monolinguistic.’ Instead of speaking their language, they let their language speak for them. In this way, the polysemic value of the term logos allowed them to dispense with distinguishing between … the language they speak and the language proper to man.”4 To extrapolate a little, we might say that translation, at least for philosophy, implies an interaction premised on a dialogue with Greek philosophy’s monologue with itself (and “man”). The shore from which translations depart, heading toward the farther shores of Latin or German (the languages chiefly at issue in this entry), will always have been the Greek shore. What translation must do, as far as philosophy’s privileged languages are concerned, is always advert to the Greek monolanguage. For that language mustn’t be lost in translation: Latin or German must still speak that logos, in and through their own acts of “translation.” So we remain, despite, or because of translation, always in the vicinities of Greek. We’ve hardly left philosophia, and begun to think (for instance, in Mandarin), if philosophy’s translatory models still defer to that polysemic, but still unique Word. The philosophy at issue when assessing the (translatory) operations of worlding is logocentric philosophy. Consider, now, Derrida’s Of Grammatology. The logos, he argues, implies the fullness of a Word profiled primarily in terms of the spoken word. Hence the written word has either been feared or regarded as merely secondary. But, as if uneasily aware that it still needs writing, philosophy has often sought an ideal “script” for itself. And that ideality would mirror an equally ideal philosophical language—one universally transparent and in no need of translation. Leibniz is Derrida’s example, for he envisioned Chinese providing that ideal script and language. Derrida refers to “the ‘Chinese’ prejudice; all the philosophical projects of a universal script and a universal language.”5 This is a Western prejudice, however, a corollary of the fact that “logocentrism is an ethnocentric metaphysics. It is related to the history of the West.”6 Leibniz’s reliance on a Chinese model “interrupts” this Western history only inasmuch as Chinese tasked to solve a specifically Western philosophical problem, namely the lack of a universally transparent philosophical language and an idealized “script.” Thus “not only does this model remain a domestic representation, but also, it is praised only for the purpose of designating a lack and to define the necessary corrections.”7 A Chinese person would disabuse Leibniz of his account of the Chinese language and contest that European “domestic representation,” of course. But that’s not quite the point: “The concept of Chinese writing

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thus functioned as a sort of European hallucination … And the hallucination translated less an ignorance than a misunderstanding. It was not disturbed by the knowledge of Chinese script, limited but real, which was then available.”8 Western philosophy knew its version of “Chinese” was idealized, but it was undisturbed by that knowledge since the imperative to idealize a philosophical language, and hence idealize away the dangers of “writing” (and translation moreover), was an imperative that always drove logocentrism, or this ethnocentric metaphysics. Worlding philosophy? Or worlding logocentrism, or indeed an ethnocentric metaphysics? These are the questions Of Grammatology raises for this chapter, just as it raises them for any complacent approach to or designation of “philosophy” (and only an incompetent reading of Derrida’s text will conclude that he shares the “Chinese prejudice” he names himself and turns into a theme for Western philosophy). At this juncture, we can now adduce Heidegger’s meditation on the Daodejing—it involved a co-translation of that text with Paul Shih-yi Hsiao.9 It was hardly a proper translation, however, and the effort was abandoned. But it wasn’t just a matter of Heidegger’s inexpertise in the Chinese language. More fundamentally at stake were Heidegger’s doubts concerning the possibility of building a philosophical bridge between West and East. Despite referencing Eastern languages and texts, Heidegger’s persistent focus remained European, particularly as regards the relationship to be (re)built between Greek and German thought. And that necessarily concerns Western philosophy’s engagement with the history of Being, an engagement begun in ancient Greece and continuing toward the contemporary age of “technology.” That history would accordingly be Western, and the prospects for a transformation of that history equally Western. In view of that history and that prospect, the East is of only secondary interest. There is a philosophical dialogue between East and West in Heidegger, nonetheless. But that hardly warrants viewing Heidegger as a thinker concerned with worldly diversity—a pluralistic philosopher, that is to say. In any case, at issue for Heidegger is how Western philosophy, with its attendant languages, participates in the rearticulation of whatever Being, since the Greeks, has been “saying,” “sending,” or “calling” for. And if this is indeed a matter of rearticulation (a sort of translation, therefore), then it’s no surprise that Heidegger’s essays on language either neglect non-European languages or deploy them in a tendentious manner. Furthermore, Heidegger doesn’t imagine a cosmopolitan subject, touring the globe, confident in her foreign-language ability, nor is his vision of a certain worldly rootlessness the outcome of a dispossession of one’s own native tongue, or induced by an uncertainty as to what language one feels most at home in. Much preferred, in any case, is the link between having a native tongue and the existential securities of being “at home.” The world is better profiled, therefore, in the image of the local intimacies of home. The world preferably discloses itself as the familiar vicinities of the nearby, and “dwelling” preferably models its coziness on the comfortable connection a person has to her mother tongue. Worlding, for Heidegger, involves plotting the trajectory of “homecoming,” and this is also the trajectory of Western philosophy, or the philosophy of Being: home to Greece, albeit after a time away, but, at all events, the site of that “away” was never so far distant that one can imagine philosophy in permanent exile (or having re-domiciled itself in “Asia”). There is Eurocentrism in Heidegger, therefore. But it’s hardly an outright bias against the East. For if an aspect of Heidegger’s inspection of the West, and indeed Westernization, is rooted in a mistrust of technological modernity, then one can invoke Heidegger and wonder whether that West imposed technological rationalization upon the East as well. But that “West” is defined in terms of modernity and a certain globalization. The other “West” is

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that which cleaves to its Greek beginnings—and it’s this “West” Heideggerian philosophy is primarily tasked to construe and to think. Back to Derrida—this time to “Violence and Metaphysics” in Writing and Difference. The abiding issue is that “the entirety of philosophy is conceived on the basis of its Greek source. … It is simply that the founding concepts of philosophy are primarily Greek, and it would not be possible to philosophize, or to speak philosophically, outside this medium.”10 “In question is a powerful will to explication of the history of Greek speech.”11 Derrida’s own “will to explication” is more akin to an Auseinandersetzung, a philosophical “set to,” a sleeves-rolledup wrangle with that Greek “medium.” As early as Writing and Difference, Derrida was looking for “another heading” for European thought. That autre cap might herald a new navigation, a sailing beyond the promontories of (continental) Europe for another, indistinctly fartherflung destination.12 Heidegger, for his part, has his own water-borne imagery, but the import is very different. Derrida: “When Heidegger says that ‘for a long time, too long, thought has been desiccated,’ like a fish out of water, the element to which he wishes to return thought is still—already—the Greek element, the Greek thought of Being, the thought of Being whose irruption or call produced Greece.”13 Thought has become bone-dry: Being, the thought of Being, needs reimmersing in the Greek element. Thalatta! Thalatta! Philosophy must relearn Greek and return to the wine-dark Mediterranean Sea. The Mediterranean always foams at philosophy’s coast. But Derrida struggles with the notion that “we are consigned to the security of the Greek element.”14 Matters aren’t so secure, because caveats must be entered concerning Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences, for example. Still, whether thinking philosophy’s situation in terms of crisis or security, the context remains “Europe.” Whence Derrida’s observation that dialogue between Husserlian phenomenology and Heideggerian ontology implies a conversation between “two Greeks named Husserl and Heidegger.”15 But if the question remains that of worlding Greek or Eurocentric philosophy to the rest of the world, then that worlding is already accomplished— the world captured (or colonized) by logocentrism. Via his own essay, Derrida purports to intervene “at the moment when the fundamental conceptual system produced by the Greco-European adventure is in the process of taking over all of humanity.”16 Indeed, this takeover apparently describes “the worldwide historico-philosophical situation.”17 If so, then philosophy has already worlded itself. Worlding philosophy makes no sense if that implies an ongoing process, as if there’s unfinished business (or if there’s something yet to be done, it concerns an incomplete philosophical idea of “Europe”). But, for Derrida, it’s still possible to question philosophy. To do so is to think in the company of Emmanuel Levinas—he who introjects certain Jewish motifs that are as acceptable to Derrida as they are problematic for Heidegger. But if Levinas, or Derrida, envisions a different world for philosophy, different global locales, and therefore a different operation of worlding as well, things aren’t so simple. Refusing Heidegger’s desiccated fish thirsty for the Mediterranean, Derrida envisages Levinas inviting philosophy to place itself “at the heart of the desert.”18 But it’s not just a matter of philosophy venturing toward its Sinai of the mind; it’s also a matter of regarding “desert” as the name for a nowhere place, off the world map entirely. Levinas’s thought “summons us to a dislocation of the Greek logos, to a dislocation of our identity, and perhaps of identity in general; it summons us to depart from the Greek site and perhaps from every site in general, and to move toward what is no longer a source or a site.”19 To depart from the Greek site is to venture to a site philosophy cannot construe as a site at all. Deprived of logos, philosophers suffer like the anchorite reduced to the plaintive vox clamantis in deserto.

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Worlding philosophy? The barely thinkable opposite is that of an un-worlding of philosophy—a thought of utter dis-location, sitelessness, and dis-identification. Philosophy’s desertification: more desiccation, rather than more immersions in the dewy waters of the Greek arche.

TRAVELING TRUTHS Other thinkers express no desire for philosophy’s “otherwheres” and are unbothered by philosophy’s ethno- and Eurocentrism. Consider Alain Badiou. Philosophy, for him, remains focused on ontology. To be is to be situated in space and time. But situatedness exposes us to happenstance. Things happen to us, and the most intense happenings are called “Events” (whence Badiou’s magnum opus Being and Event). Ontology must think Being and eventhood and therefore address what happens when we become subject to an event. Addressing such matters, Badiou argues, requires retrieving Greek philosophy: “If philosophy—which is the disposition for designating exactly where the joint questions of being and of what-happens are at stake—was born in Greece, it is because it is there that ontology established, with the first deductive mathematics, the necessary form of its discourse.”20 Notice the corollary: the necessary form of ontology’s discourse is mathematics. The necessary “translation” of that Greek philosophical idiom implies the adoption of a mathematical discourse. Now philosophy can offer a “mathematical ontology,”21 where mathematics is tasked to “express” what it means to be, and become transformed into a subject thanks to an event. But what of this translation of philosophy into mathematics? Such a translation would be all the more desirable because mathematics is eminently suited to the expression of what philosophy must be capable of expressing as well, namely the expression of truths. Hence mathematical truths themselves mustn’t be vulnerable to “relativization,” as if one-plus-one-equals-two is merely an assertion of “hegemony,” or a culture-specific conclusion rather than a universally valid deduction. Thus Badiou asks in Logics of Worlds: “Does it follow that everything is culture, including mathematics? That universality is but a fiction? And perhaps an imperialist, or even totalitarian fiction?”22 It doesn’t: the universal truths mathematics establishes are immune from such considerations because mathematics doesn’t impose truth on anybody; it just is truth’s expression. Philosophical worlding implies the declaration of a truth’s worldwide, universal applicability. Required is, accordingly, mathematical formalization that is indifferent to cultural differences. Here is philosophy’s ideal idiom: a Greek idiom, and/as the idiom of mathematics, an idiom which purveys truth to the world (or purveys the world to truth) and does so without arrogance, totalitarianism, or imperialism. That idiom therefore shields philosophy from the perils of translation, from Babel, and from natural languages. For once anything becomes amenable to mathematics’ formalizations and deductions, then we’re in the clear: a mathematical equation is as intelligible in Dublin as it is in Delhi. It’s a matter of what Badiou, in The Age of the Poets, calls the “literal transparency of mathematics.”23 Imagine: philosophy’s worlding achieved by the universal translatability of mathematics, by its literal transparency. A truth, thanks to this transparency, to this ideal translation, will travel intact and remain as true as it was when it left “home.” Thus we discover the domain philosophy really aspires to—not world, but universe. Consider: “truths—that is the name that philosophy has always reserved for them— … exhibit a type of universality that those elements, drawn from worldly particularity cannot sustain

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on their own.”24 Note philosophy’s privilege to reserve truths for itself. Wonder, therefore, what gestures of reservation are implied—the keeping of truths, their safeguarding as truths if and when mathematics can immunize their verity from cultural relativism. Note that if truths exhibit a universality, they must somehow subtract themselves from worldly particularity, because particularity thwarts any bid to universalize. Whence Badiou’s resistance to “skepticism which reduced the effects of truth to particular anthropological operations.”25 Such skepticism implies a “linguistic sophistry legitimating the right to cultural difference against any universalist pretension on the part of truths.”26 What menaces that universalist pretension is whoever or whatever asserts the right to cultural difference. For this reembeds a candidate for truth into “culture,” and then anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and many others will claim that truths are relative to different cultures—and therefore aren’t truths at all. Skepticism with regard to truths, in Badiou’s view, is displayed whenever cultural difference, or “diversity,” is insisted upon. Skepticism and linguistic sophistry: the menaces fought with such vigor by Plato. For Badiou, the celebration of worldly diversity is merely bien pensant: it worlds the world into difference, but that sort of worlding is deleterious to the universalist pretension of truths. Philosophy’s worlding, assuming it can immunize itself from anthropology, sociology, and historiography (the menace from without) and linguistic sophistry (the menace from within), is accomplished only if truths can be declared—without totalitarian or imperialist arrogance—to be universally valid. Yet if a “mathematical ontology” is at issue, then what needs to happen to Being, or, more modestly, to us, so that it becomes possible to speak of truth? Events need to happen. For Badiou, they happen not in the world, but in worlds—each world is reserved for a given event’s occurrence. These events occur, “appear,” stake their claim on us, and indeed alter the horizons of the merely possible, thwart the status quo which peremptorily decides what can be and can exist, and what cannot be or cannot exist. But isn’t any discourse that quests beyond the possible, and the current determinations of what can exist, simply a form of utopianism? That invites philosophy to risk literary fantasy, however, by imagining worlds beyond extant worlds, imagining eutopic places that are nowhere and nowise possible. So Badiou replaces philosophical utopianism by something more rigorous, and hardly literary, namely logic. Logic is “the general theory of appearing, or of being-there, that is the theory of worlds, or of the cohesion of what comes to exist (or inexist).”27 Logic apparently takes charge of what exists and even inexists. Badiou’s theory of worlds, then, would be the ultimate instance of philosophical worlding. Logic comprehends “being-there.” It doesn’t matter where in the world “there” is, since everything is logically somewhere. To imagine otherwise is to indulge in the whimsy of Levinas and Derrida, where elsewheres and otherwheres can only be imagined as atopic spaces of dis-location and sitelessness and, at any rate, imagined as far distant from the Greek “site” that Badiou asserts is the only site for philosophy: the site of philosophy’s cleaving to its necessary discourses—mathematics and logic.

PHILOSOPHY’S MONOLINGUALISM Ontology’s task is to world a truth concerning being-in-the-world: there can be multiple “worlds” for Badiou, but only our one world affords subjects the possibility of such worlds. In any case, the truth is that being is the same everywhere (nonbeing is the nugatory “alternative”). The problem, however, is that we sundry beings are worlded inasmuch as we are homogenized by an ontology that only avails itself of the category of the Same (or the “homo”). Ontology

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pays little heed to that, however. Ontology commends its own prerogative to speak the same truth, and that’s why Badiou regards Heidegger as “the last universally recognizable philosopher.”28 Heidegger’s account of Being is universally true. Yet Heidegger went wrong, Badiou argues, when Being acquired too much mystique—an unfortunate consequence of his effort to rework ontology though the lyricism of Hölderlin and Trakl. Badiou’s mathematical ontology accordingly goes beyond Heidegger’s “poetic ontology,”29 securing philosophy’s truths concerning Being by dint of a transposition of philosophical discourse not into poetry, but into mathematics and logic. Philosophy speaks truth; otherwise it’s not philosophy. This is also why Badiou invokes philosophical materialism in Logics of Worlds. Materialism says, “There are only bodies and languages.”30 That’s true, unless one believes in souls and spirits animating our bodies. Badiou, however, reformulates that assertion: “There are only bodies and languages, except that there are truths.”31 We become Badiouvan subjects once that “exception” is borne out by our capacity to pledge to truths, and truths are in-dissociable from events that enjoin us to something more than the basic materialist scenario where we are only bodies-and-languages. But might we invite Badiou to dwell more on what it means to be a body and speak languages? It’s an invitation he declines, since that entails making the “linguistic turn” and possibly inviting the risk of linguistic sophistry. Still, surely being-in-the-world implies being-inlanguage. Understanding the world, and the others we encounter there, surely implies using language. These are the assumptions of hermeneutics, for instance, a philosophy that notably celebrates dialogue and indeed translation. Yet let’s not forget Heidegger: “Language,” he writes in “Letter on Humanism,” “is the house of Being.”32 But, the objection goes, his house resembles a fortification against intruders, a fortification that better ensures the untroubled intimacy of existential “dwelling”—an intimacy achieved by an equally untroubled certainty that we are monolingual, securely possessed of a native tongue, a Muttersprache. Consider, however, Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other: “The monolingualism in which I draw my very breath is, for me, my element … an absolute habitat.”33 Yet that “also prescribes a monastic solitude for me.”34 Monolingualism’s monastery: seclusion, and the isolation that results from having a “native” tongue, and being assigned to a “native” land presumably separate from any other land. A land like an island, perhaps—“island” as a geographical figure for the insularity of monoglottism. Yet Derrida is “on the shores of the French language, uniquely, and neither inside nor outside it, on the unplacable line of its coast.”35 “Dwelling” in language now becomes complex, and this linguistic dilemma places Derrida not in France’s terrestrial interiors, but on its coast. Or on another coast, the Algerian coast, a shore-boundary of Derrida’s Maghreb—of Derrida, the “Franco-Maghrebian who from birth, since his birth but also from his birth on the other coast, his coast, has, at bottom, chosen and understood nothing, and who still suffers and testifies.”36 Did Husserl or Heidegger ever gaze at (or from) that coast? Or ever question where Western  languages—including French—washed up? Might a tide erase the borderlines of the “coast” Western philosophy protects and preserves, limits and delimits? Derrida’s text is therefore about colonialism, a subject philosophy has arguably struggled to address. If philosophy’s worlding also implies philosophy addressing how the world was worlded by successive ages of so-called discovery, then perhaps it needs to say more on the subject. Derrida cites Edouard Glissant’s Le Discours antillais as an epigraph: “‘[L]ack’ [resides] in the non-mastery (be it in Creole or French) of an appropriated language.”37 But Derrida proposes that, while lacking an ability to wholly master the language imposed upon a colonial subject goes to the heart of colonial alienation, this non-mastery “also carries well beyond these

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determinate conditions. It also holds for what would be called the language of the master, the hospes, or the colonist.”38 Consider a “master” trying to master language itself. And if masters align with hosts and colonists, they are all similarly bent on commandeering language and the languages of the other—the language spoken by the guest or the “foreign” languages spoken by the original inhabitants of what are now colonies. The question of hospitality reemerges. Would philosophical worlding imply worlding as hosting or worlding as guesting? Wouldn’t philosophy wish to travel worldwide and be greeted like a guest, rather than a parasite? How hospitable has Western philosophy been to its guests? Is the “world” for philosophy one regulated by a world law in accordance with Kant’s legislations for “perpetual peace”? Section II, Article 3: “Cosmopolitan right shall be limited to conditions of universal hospitality.”39 Kant’s irenic vision is only scantly discerned by a political philosophy still struggling with the politics of sovereignty and the difficult implementation of a politics of friendship. Yet a philosophy devoted to universal hospitality might still wish to world itself—and its single law—in the image of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or by means of a universalization that isn’t imperialist, hegemonic, or a covert Europeanization, since that might simply reactivate the motif (if that’s the word) of colonialism. In China, of course, Derrida was a guest, but his remark, at lunch, perhaps invites imagining a Chinese philosopher hosted in the West: admitted as a “guest,” but on condition that she accept to be monikered as a Greek philosopher, adhere to the determinations of philosophia, and always dialogue/monologue like a logocentrist. If there’s no hospitality without a host, and therefore always the possibility of a master’s arrogance, then violence alas always attends the gracious gesture of worldliness, namely inviting a stranger to be translated into a guest. But Derrida’s question is whether language can be mastered without violence. Apparently not: “Because the master does not possess exclusively, and naturally, what he calls his language … he can … pretend historically, through the rape of a cultural usurpation, which means always essentially colonial, to appropriate it in order to impose it as ‘his own.’”40 One can’t possess one’s own, “native” tongue, but that fact triggers in “masters” the violent desire to possess it just the same. But, Derrida argues, if anyone’s “native” tongue is un-possessable, then everyone is similarly exposed to an originary dispossession. All will say “I only have one language; it is not mine.”41 If dispossession profiles itself in the image of a colonialism that visits non-mastery and “lack” upon others, but colonialism also amounts to the impossible, mad, and violent drive to possess language and languages, then Derrida’s provocative implication is that we are all “colonial” subjects. No one, ever, hasn’t been a colonial subject, because no one, ever, hasn’t been (dis)possessed by (mono)language. That’s what it means to be worlded by language: emplacement in the world by means of an assignation to only one “native” language and just one “native” land, and all this achieved by a colonization that visits the same operation upon us all. It’s a matter of “essential coloniality.”42 That, pace Badiou, is perhaps what it means to be a body-and-language. Derrida provocatively overextends what “colonialism” means, and there are questions concerning the likening of colonialism to rape. But if, as Derrida suggests, “mastery” implies a history of the pretension that one can master the un-masterable—language itself—then perhaps we can return to translation. For the Babel tower-builders aspired to universalize one tongue—to master the world’s languages. A violent aspiration, or a well-meaning desire to pacify the world, to replace confusion by harmony? George Steiner’s After Babel envisions an afterward to Babel’s confusion, but unless one indulges in retrograde “Adamic” fantasies (or theo-logocentrism), “before Babel” has never been. Political and linguistic peace has therefore been deferred in favor of war, usurpation, and indeed the violence of translation as well.

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For Steiner’s own model envisages “meaning brought home captive by the translator.”43 “The translator,” he adds, “invades.”44 Invasion, booty, the spoils of war. This grim model resonates with models of colonial violence, gender-based violence (female captives are often the “spoils”), and violence in general. This isn’t the only translation model available, and emphatically isn’t the only model philosophy—when it attends to its own translations— adopts. Still, when philosophy makes its incursion into translation studies, couldn’t that be regarded as a will to mastery? Mastery achieved, for instance, over the promiscuous mixing of languages as and when certain words are declared untranslatable. Or mastery over linguistic diversity, as if philosophy imposes a settlement (a word I use advisedly) upon such diversity in the name of the universal philosophical idiom of mathematics—a sovereign idiom Badiou nonetheless insists isn’t totalitarian or imperialist. Or the mastery achieved by an abidingly logocentric philosophy. Imagine scandalized philosophers being asked whether logocentrism effects an essential coloniality—the colonization of thought by philosophy, philosophy’s translation into philosophia, linguistic usurpation achieved by a “translation” forever faithful to the logos. The Greeks. “You must read them in the original.”45 So says philosophy. But it was Buck Mulligan who said this, in Joyce’s Ulysses. Thalatta! Thalatta! My readers will hopefully have detected my earlier allusion to Ulysses and hopefully tolerate this last-ditch smugglingin of literature. Stephen Daedalus demurs. And he gazes not at Homer’s and Odysseus’s wine-dark Mediterranean but at Ireland’s snotgreen sea. From Ireland’s coast, he sees a seal: “Usurper.”46 Perhaps Stephen knew something of Derrida’s “essential coloniality.” Perhaps Joyce knew something about linguistic dispossession and about the desire to reappropriate an English monolingualism that remains the monolingualism of the other. It’s tempting to view philosophy’s worlding in the image of Joyce’s rewriting of The Odyssey (and in Leopold Bloom’s image, moreover). Joyce rewrites one of Homer’s canonical texts, and perhaps philosophy has always been rewriting an essentially Greek philosophical canon. But the question is whether philosophy will permit itself to induce a Bloomian wandering (or foment Derridean destinerrance). Certainly it’s tempting to wonder whether philosophy would accept a characterization of its monolanguage as “Jewgreek.” Perhaps it’s time philosophy spoke Arabgreek or Mandaringreek. Time, too, for philosophy to creolize itself, à la Glissant. It’s asking a lot, however, since philosophy prefers universal idioms, transparent to everyone, wherever they are in the world. Either it’s the possibility of that idiom which enables philosophy to world itself to the world, or that’s what confines philosophy to a monoglot precinct that hardly bespeaks “world” at all. Finnegans Wake was Joyce’s most Babelic (or Lebabic) text. But philosophy’s anti-Babelic proclivities are such that I cannot resist adapting Joyce’s first sentence with philosophy in mind. Perhaps it might go like this: Riverrun, past Plato, Husserl, Heidegger, and Badiou, from swerve of Baltic shore to bend of Biscay bay, philosophy’s logocentric discourse-stream never runs out beyond the vicinities of its privileged sites and languages, bringing us always, by a commodius vicus of recirculation, a commodius vicus of translation, back to the Greek source and its environs.

NOTES 1 Plato, The Collected Dialogues, trans. R. Hackforth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 521. 2 See Carine Defoort and Ge Zhaoguang, “Editors’ Introduction,” Contemporary Chinese Thought 37.1 (Fall 2005): 3–10.

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3 Barbara Cassin, Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, trans. Stephen Rendall et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 1139. 4 Ibid. 5 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 76. 6 Ibid., 79. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 80. 9 For more on the subject, see Lin Ma, “Deciphering Heidegger’s Connection with the Daodejing,” Asian Philosophy 16.3 (2006): 149–71. 10 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 81. 11 Derrida, Writing and Difference, 83. 12 See Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). 13 Derrida, Writing and Difference, 82. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 83. 16 Ibid., 82. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 11. 21 Ibid., 10. 22 Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds, trans. Alberto Toscano (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019), xxviii. 23 Alain Badiou, The Age of the Poets, trans. Bruno Bosteels (New York: Verso, 2014), 35. 24 Badiou, Logics of Worlds, xlviii. 25 Badiou, Being and Event, xv. 26 Ibid. 27 Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 517. 28 Badiou, Being and Event, 1. 29 Ibid., 10. 30 Badiou, Logics of Worlds, xvii. 31 Ibid., xx. 32 Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (London: Harper Perennial, 2008), 217. 33 Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, or: The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 1. 34 Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, 1. 35 Ibid., 2. 36 Ibid., 19. 37 Ibid., n.p. 38 Ibid., 23. 39 Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, trans. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Press, 1983), 118. 40 Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, 23. 41 Ibid., 1. 42 Ibid., 24. 43 George Steiner, After Babel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 314. 44 Ibid. 45 James Joyce, Ulysses (London: Random House, 1986), 4. 46 Ibid., 19.

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WORKS CITED Arendt, Hannah. The Life of the Mind. New York: Harcourt, 1981. Badiou, Alain. The Age of the Poets. Trans. Bruno Bosteels. New York: Verso, 2014. Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. Trans. Oliver Feltham. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. Badiou, Alain. Logics of Worlds. Trans. Alberto Toscano. New York: Bloomsbury, 2019. Cassin, Barbara. Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon. Trans. Stephen Rendall et al. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. Defoort, Carine (and Ge Zhaoguang). “Editors’ Introduction.” Contemporary Chinese Thought 37.1 (2005): 3–10. Derrida, Jacques. Monolingualism of the Other, or: The Prosthesis of Origin. Trans. Patrick Mensah. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Derrida, Jacques. The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Derrida, Jacques, and Catherine Malabou. Counterpath. Trans. David Wills. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. Glissant, Edouard. Le Discours antillais. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1981. Heidegger, Martin. “Letter on Humanism.” Basic Writings. Ed. David Farrell Krell. London: Harper Perennial, 2008, 217–65. Heidegger, Martin. “What Calls for Thinking?” Basic Writings. Ed. David Farrell Krell. London: Harper Perennial, 2008, 369–91. Heidegger, Martin. “Zu den Inseln der Ägäis.” Gesamtausgabe, Band 75. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000. 249–73. Husserl, Edmund. The Crisis of European Sciences. Trans. David Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970. Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1999. Joyce, James. Ulysses. London: Random House, 1986. Kant, Immanuel. “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch.” Perpetual Peace and Other Essays. Trans. Ted Humphrey. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Press, 1983. Ma, Lin. “Deciphering Heidegger’s Connection with the Daodejing.” Asian Philosophy 16.3 (2006): 149–71. Plato. The Collected Dialogues. Trans. R. Hackforth. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. Steiner, George. After Babel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

CHAPTER THREE

Worlding Ethics NIGEL DOWER

In this chapter, I explore how ethical thought has gradually become more focused on ethically significant relationships that people and countries increasingly have with other peoples and countries all over the world. Although ideas about human relationships worldwide go back to the ancient world, my main focus in this chapter is on the last seventy-five years, because, partly as a result of the Second World War, there was greater interest than before in a global approach, for example, in world citizenship and in universal standards as expressed for instance in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, and this interest in a global approach has since then become a major feature of modern thought. The phrase “worlding ethics” is not a natural one, though the cognate concepts of world ethics and world citizenship did have some currency, particularly from the middle of the last century to the end of it. That said, almost everyone nowadays who considers the approach and issues discussed in this chapter uses the phrase “global ethics” and its cognate “global citizenship.” Substantively, this chapter is about global ethics and the globalizing of ethics. Other phrases have also been employed, such as international ethics, cosmopolitan ethics, and universal ethics. While the emphases and nuances of these may be slightly different, they all have in common with world ethics the perspective that the two commonly recognized domains of ethics—namely personal ethics and social/political ethics—need supplementing with this third domain world/global ethics, a domain that is denied or questioned for various communitarian or relativist reasons.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND The idea of ethics being universal and applicable to all human beings actually goes back to the ancient world and has featured in much religious thought in all the major religious traditions. One prominent example of this was the ancient Stoics. Stoicism was a major religion/philosophical tradition from the third century BC to the third century AD. Stoicism developed a complex system of thought called “cosmopolitanism.” Literally, “cosmopolitan” means “citizen (polites) of the universe (cosmos),” but in practice it meant being a citizen of the world. This idea is illuminated by its contrast to Aristotle’s idea that “man is a political animal.”1 For Aristotle, what enabled human beings to fulfill their essence was living in a highly contained political community such as a city-state, whereas for the Stoics what was important to our human essence was what I shared with all our fellow human beings, namely our rationality and our capacity to understand the universal moral law, later called by Stoics like Cicero and then Catholic theologians “the natural law”—a law that could be understood

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by natural reason (in contrast to, for instance, revelation). Compared with later developments of global/cosmopolitan ethics, which focused on the extent and nature of our global responsibilities across borders, this cosmopolitan vision was more a way of understanding our status as members of the world moral community. This universal ethics perspective remained a feature of medieval and early modern Catholic thought in the West. Catholic theologians such as Vittoria were increasingly concerned about how the newly emerging nation-states in Europe should relate to one another. In addition to the ius gentium (law of peoples) based on natural law, there were also developing the laws of nations (later called, following Bentham, “international law”) as a way of producing some order in a chaotic world. In 1648, the Peace of Westphalia finally established in a fully formal way the existence of nation-states as having sovereignty over discretely defined areas of the world, and the domain of religious authority no longer applied to that directly. The key figure in the development of this still dominant worldview underlying the international system was Hugo Grotius, whose seminal work provided the framework for this system.2 Grotius’s approach can be seen in contrast to another way of looking at international relations as promoted for instance by Thomas Hobbes at much the same time.3 These two approaches, in contrast to the cosmopolitan approach developed by others, particularly by Immanuel Kant a little later, are important for understanding world/global ethics. Unlike cosmopolitanism, the Grotian approach only recognizes a fairly attenuated form of global ethics, whereas the Hobbesian approach was altogether skeptical of this. These two are often called the realist/skeptical realist approach and the internationalist/“society of states” approach. On the Hobbesian view, because there is no higher power in the world above nationstates to enforce compliance, there are no ethical relations between states, because obligation requires in the background coercion.4 International relations are a battle for power and the domain for promoting one’s national self-interest as best as possible. In the internationalist approach, nation-states are not merely part of a system but are a kind of society governed by rules or laws that limit the occasions of violence by giving states the monopoly in the legitimacy of using violence and by ensuring a framework in which international agreements and increasingly trade contracts would be honored. It is really a framework in which states are expected to avoid or only minimally inflict harm on other states; it was not initially a framework for much more positive responsibilities toward others needing help in the world— this comes later. The third approach to international relations is cosmopolitanism, or what is sometimes called “Kantianism.” The latter label is used because Kant was a prominent advocate of it, but one need not be a Kantian in one’s approach to ethics to be a cosmopolitan, as explained later in this chapter. In Kant’s view, all human beings are rational agents and are, as such, worthy, of respect from all other human beings.5 The general point that marks cosmopolitanism as distinct from international skepticism and internationalism is that if all human beings are of equal moral consideration, then the behavior of states, the character of the international interactions, and the nature of international institutions need to be assessed against this moral standard of how well they promote human well-being generally.6 (Indeed some later Kantians— though not Kant—have seen the very existence of the nation-state system as opposed to, say, a world federal system as part of the problem.)7 Although cosmopolitanism had some influence, because of the work of Kant and to some extent other Enlightenment thinkers in the eighteenth century, it rather waned in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century but became more important after the Second World War.

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DEVELOPMENTS SINCE 1945 First, in 1948, there was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR),8 as a reaction to the Second World War and its horrors, and the Declaration set out certain universal moral standards. Though very general, this proved a useful basis for the development of more specific forms of international law such as the two Covenants of 1966. Because it was presented as a soft law declaration, it was not described as such as a world ethic or global ethic. If anything, it would be referred to as a universal ethic (reflecting the earlier traditions mentioned above). But its appearance and acceptance represented a significant step in the process of worlding or globalizing ethics. The word “world” did feature in the acceptance of the idea of world citizenship, for instance, in the Council in Education for World Citizenship,9 which was (and remains) active in schools. The phrase “world ethics” was used quite widely by those interested in this global perspective. Books were written with this title.10 By the early 1990s, for instance, Hans Küng’s Weltethos Stiftung had launched the Global Ethic Project. Küng published a book in 1992 entitled Global Responsibility: In Search of a New World Ethic.11 Courses were taught on world ethics, and there was at least one book series on World Ethics.12 Interestingly, in the 1990s there was increasing discussion representing the same perspective in terms of “global ethics.” Indeed, Küng saw himself as promoting a global ethic and was one of the chief architects of The Declaration toward a Global Ethic in 1993—a declaration made by the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago.13 By the end of the 1990s, the phrase “global ethics” and, in parallel, “a global ethic” had taken over from the phrases “world ethics” and “world ethic.” (Note that “global/world ethics” is the study of/reflection on ethical issues in global relations, whereas “a global/world ethic” stands for values that are global in content/acceptance.) Two other phrases, “international ethic(s)” and “universal ethic(s),” are now used much less. There was a time in the late twentieth century when books and courses were about “international ethics,”14 whose content was the same as that conveyed by the phrases world ethics and global ethics—covering the whole range of global relations from an ethical point of view. “International” has always had this ambiguity of referring both to relationships between nation-states as such (inter-nation) and also to relations more generally across borders. To this  day, “being a good internationalist” and “having an international outlook” are about having a global ethical outlook, but the phrase “international ethics” is not generally used (or if it is, it is applied more narrowly to interstate relations). Again, “universal ethic(s)” is not used as such so much, though the issue of the universality or universal-ness of ethical values and norms is often assumed, albeit, as I will see later, qualified by the recognition that it must embrace significant diversity of expression and application according to cultural context and the like. UNESCO itself ran a project on universal ethics/ethical universality at the turn of the century.15 One thing though that makes the phrase global ethic(s) more comprehensive is the fact that it lends itself more naturally to the recognition of global or transboundary obligation/responsibility: universality as such does not imply this, since it could be argued that certain values are (or are to be) universally accepted everywhere but not responsibility in other places in respect to those values. As I explore more fully next, an important respect in which the idea of a global/world ethic has developed in the last seventy-five years has been the increasing interest in the idea of and issues concerning an ethic as a globally shared ethic, in contrast to the more traditional idea of an ethic as global or universal in content.

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WORLDING/GLOBALIZING ETHICS: ISSUES AND MEANINGS I turn now to a more reflective examination of worlding/globalizing ethics (or the worlding of/globalizing of ethics) as a process. There are two aspects to this: (a) the ethical critique of what happens at a global level and in particular human interactions at a global level, and (b) the move toward ethical thought itself being global in scope of content and global in scope of acceptance. The two are connected, but the focus in the first is by ethics on something else, namely global relations; the focus in the second is by sociology, history, other disciplines, and indeed philosophy itself on ethics itself as something undergoing change. The Ethical Critique of Human Interactions at a Global Level There is nothing new about humans thinking about what happens at the global level in ethical terms. When travel became more common across the world, questions were raised about how to treat the foreigner or stranger and what to do when one came across customs that were different from one’s own. When nations or groups fought one another, there was a gradual recognition that war might be limited by ethical standards as a way of limiting its awfulness—for instance in the doctrine of “not directly attacking the innocent.” Norms governing international trade were developed, and so on. What is new in the modern world is simply the extent and dominance of these ethical questions having to do with how things happened globally. This is sometimes expressed in the phrase “the globalization of ethics,” where globalization is itself subject to ethical critique. Globalization is of course a multifaceted process covering, most prominently, economic globalization, the globalization of community (e.g., through the internet), governance, knowledge, and so on16—and to be added to this list, as discussed below, the globalization of ethics itself. A prominent example of ethical critique is Peter Singer’s One World: The Ethics of Globalization (2001).17 Normally, if a thinker wishes to subject various dimensions of globalization to ethical examination, this will be based upon the thinker’s global ethic, that is, on values and norms seen as applicable everywhere. These ethical theories are again often of ancient origin, but what is new about these ethical theories is the way they are applied and interpreted in the context of global issues and problems. This article is not itself about these ethical theories, which would take at least another full entry to do justice to. Later, I look at a number of global issues like the role of the United Nations, world poverty, the environment, and war and peace and apply briefly these long-standing global ethics approaches to these issues. Here I briefly indicate these major philosophical theories and contrast them to other ethical theories that do not accept a global ethic. First, we have utilitarianism (reflected in Singer’s approach) whereby policies and practices in the world are examined against the key question: do they on balance promote human well-being better than any other policies and practices? Second, we have the approach of Kant and Kantians for whom the key question in ethics against which policies and practices must be judged is whether these practices can be universalized and whether they conform or not to the principle that we should never treat human beings merely as means but always ends in themselves, that is, as rational agents worthy of respect. Third, there are human rights approaches according to which policies and practices must be judged whether they advance and respect human rights or impede and violate them. (Depending on what key rights are recognized, human rights theories will have different emphases: I examine this in connection with development issues.)18 However, ethical theories such as communitarianism

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and relativism are less keen on or hostile to the idea of a global ethic involving universal norms and values, which, of course, is the assumption behind the three theories mentioned. There are other ethical theories as well, which can be and are interpreted to have global extension but need not be. Virtue ethics, an important source of which is Aristotle’s ethics, is an approach that is distinct from the above. Two aspects are important: first, the centrality of moral virtue (which has to do with a person’s character traits and motives) as opposed to individual acts or rules; and second, the importance of the wider range of powers/capabilities that agents can develop and exercise, which enable them to live fulfilled lives or “achieve flourishing.” This approach has powerful modern global application to thinking about socioeconomic development. This asks the question: what, for anyone anywhere, are the enabling conditions for these capabilities to be realized? There are also theories of justice, traditionally often applied only to within societies, which are now sometimes extended to include global (social) justice. These are sometimes based on some kind of contract theory, such as that developed by Charles Beitz19 using John Rawls’s influential A Theory of Justice20 model but applying it to the world. There have also developed, particularly in the latter half of the twentieth century, various theories of environmental or ecological ethic. A concern for the environment need not be global in approach but typically is, as I note later. Some theories are essentially applications of or extensions of the traditional ethical approaches above, and some provide a more radically alternative vision of global ethical responsibility (see later). Finally, there are the various ethical approaches taken by all the major religions, which are often but not always seen as having global application. Religiously based ethics grounds its ethical position in a certain theology or worldview, but the various ethical views that come out of these sources or grounds may often provide support for one or other of the broader ethical positions outlined above, but at the same time may offer a distinctive ethic with global application, focusing for instance on the ethics of love.21 The Process Whereby Ethical Thought Becomes Global in Scope of Content and Global in Scope of Acceptance These two elements—scope of content and scope of acceptance—are distinct but interconnected. Generally speaking, those who see the content of their ethics as being global in scope and wish to see others accepting the same perspective also see the increasing acceptance by people all over the world of that ethic as evidence of there being a globally shared ethic. But being globally shared does not entail being universally shared, and, as I indicate shortly, there may be a number of different globally shared ethics in the world. The process whereby people’s ethical thinking becomes global in content as opposed to focused on personal relationships and social relationships within established societies is a subject for sociological inquiry. Until the beginning of the twenty-first century, it was generally held that there was a progressive move toward greater acceptance of a global perspective in ethics by more and more people. But since the beginning of the twenty-first century, and in particular after the symbolic turning point of September 11, 2001 (“9/11”), many would argue that there has been a move back to a more localized, not to say nationalistic or xenophobic, perspective—which is the antithesis of the global ethics perspective. What about a globally shared ethic or an ethic that is global in respect to the scope of its acceptance? There is plenty of evidence that there has been a process whereby, particularly in the last seventy-five years, ethics has become more globalized in this sense, though again in the twenty-first century the reverse is happening to some extent too. Although in one sense this is a sociological question, it is full of conceptual and philosophical issues. Here

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are some examples of evidence for the emergence of a globally shared ethic. First, there is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, which represented, as international “soft law,” basically a moral framework that has to some extent been accepted by all nations in the world. This attempted to set out in document form what its drafters regarded as an already widely accepted set of basic norms/rights concerning human dignity and freedom. In the 1990s, we have two examples: in 1993, we had the Declaration toward a Global Ethic of the Parliament of the World’s Religions which sought to set out the pre-existing moral core from all the major religions in a single statement where the very statement of it reinforced the acceptance of its content. In 1995, an influential international report on global governance claimed to identify a widely accepted global civic ethic.22 In 2000, the Earth Council promulgated something called The Earth Charter, which, it claimed, represented widespread acceptance throughout the world of a rich set of principles regarding respect for the earth, human development, democracy, and peace—which had been put together as a result of cross-cultural dialogue all over the world during the 1990s.23 If one looks at statements and documents of this kind, it is clear that those behind them not only saw themselves identifying ethical norms and principles that are globally shared by people and country representatives all over the world but also saw these principles somehow emerging as universally accepted by everyone—in which case we would have a global ethic which was a universal ethic qua universally shared. Several comments are in order at this stage about attempts to identify a global ethic shared by everyone across the world. At one level it is an illusion, at another level it is dangerous if it becomes a project to convert the rest of the world to one’s preferred global ethic. If these declarations are taken to represent a universally shared ethic already, it is an illusion. At best, it is really an aspirational project based on the hope, and possibly the expectation in some, that someday virtually everyone, whatever their cultural background, would accept some significant common core of shared values. (We say “virtually everyone” because there will always be a few individuals and small minorities who are oddballs over what is commonly accepted—this was always the case already within societies.) First, even in regard to these declarations (and others), the values and norms identified are not entirely the same; but second, and more crucially, there are in fact a number of rival global ethics in the world in the sense of an ethic shared by significant numbers of people all over the world. For many people, particularly those who work in the business world, there is for instance a very significant ethic based on economic libertarianism or the value of the free market, and it is the adequacy and indeed correctness of these values that are challenged by those who support a global ethic like The Declaration toward a Global Ethics or The Earth Charter. (An aspect of this is the conflict touched on later between advocates of conventional economic development and the models of appropriate development commonly advocated by NGOs or global civil society, based on different and richer ethical principles and values.) There is also a long-standing shared global ethic accepted by many in political power and the international diplomatic service, an ethic about the appropriate norms that should govern international relations, which are different from the cosmopolitan norms that are often associated with those who explicitly advocate a global ethic—the former being the limited norms in the internationalist “society of states” approach. Next there is the challenge to the adequacy of a shared global ethic like The Earth Charter, where the ethic is presented as a set of norms and values to be accepted by people from a wide variety of different backgrounds, without reference to any particular justifying story or worldview—theological, philosophical, or embedded in particular cultural narratives. If

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for a particular person or group the ethic they wish to accept and advocate is not merely some sets of values and norms but the justifying story in which they are embedded, then the value of a shared ethic that is shared by people with many different other stories cannot be accepted as adequate. If, however, the group that has these values believes, because of their justifying story, that these values ought to be accepted along with their justifying story by all others, then the project of getting the rest of the world to accept this global ethic is either totally unrealistic or dangerous—dangerous because it presupposes the propriety of trying if necessary to use force or other kinds of pressure to get the rest of the world to accept that position. This historically was the case with the Crusades and, for certain crucial periods of the twentieth century, was evidenced in the Cold War and proxy wars in which two ethical ideologies—that of the West and Soviet communism—battled for supremacy. By contrast, if the quest for a shared global ethic is a quest for values and norms that are not universally shared by all but by a large number of people across the world for various reasons, and this is seen as valuable and a kind of global alliance, then it follows, and is widely accepted, that there needs to be respect for the diversity of justifying stories lying behind that common acceptance of a shared ethic. Bhikhu Parekh captures this well: an adequate global ethic is both consented to and assented to. It is consented to because it is the product of intercultural agreement and assented to because each person or group has their own justifying story to endorse that ethic.24

LEVELS: INDIVIDUALS AND INSTITUTIONS The process of worlding or globalizing ethics has in fact several levels. Looking at the level of individuals, there has been in the last seventy years a dramatic increase in the acceptance that individuals are world citizens or, as normally described now, global citizens. The whole concept of global citizenship has become mainstream. Although the phrase “global citizen” can be used loosely to mean almost anything to do with a global outlook (someone who enjoys global food, global culture, travels a lot, etc.), in its more serious usage it generally denotes, for someone who sees herself as a global citizen, a person who accepts a global ethic, including significant responsibility across borders by individuals, acts at least to some degree on this responsibility, and believes herself to be a member of a global community. If the phrase is used of other people, it generally covers two different ideas: first, the general idea that all human beings are global citizens because of their equal moral status (whether or not they use, know, or recognize the concept), and second, the more specific idea of a person who is committed to acting in a globally responsible way (whether or not she describes herself as a global citizen). Global citizenship is both a universal status claim and a label for a kind of engagement. Global citizenship is not really merely a fancy way of referring to a universal moral status or moral agency, since the word “citizenship” adds to the concept by implying membership of some kind of community— basically a global moral community, but sometime, more richly, membership of a global political community, influencing global change through (global) civil society, or a global legal “international human rights” community.25 Looking at the level of institutions, we have political cosmopolitanism. This is about applying a global or cosmopolitan ethic to the critique of nation-states and international institutions (and analogously business companies), that is, assessing to what extent these institutions do promote properly or adequately reflect the values accepted by the cosmopolitan thinker. A more radical approach is to make proposals for the transformation of global order into

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something significantly different from that dominated and shaped by the interstate system. Some cosmopolitans have advocated world government.26 This was particularly true in the period after the Second World War, when it was argued that the only way to avoid war again on that scale was to create a world government with coercive force. It would be fair to say that that perspective has not remained a dominant one, but meantime various other attempts to modify the international system in a way that reflected cosmopolitan values have been in evidence, for instance, attempts by writers like Held and Archibugi to advocate cosmopolitan democracy and cosmopolitan international law and human rights law.27 The movement called CAMDUN (Campaign for a More Democratic United Nations) was and is a campaign to make the UN more democratic and reflective of “we the peoples of the world”—the redolent phrase in the UN Charter. The United Nations itself has conflicting interpretations. Officially, it is an international, that is, interstate institution and represents rather than challenges the world order made up of states. But it also has elements that reflect both the traditions of skeptical realism and cosmopolitanism. All too often states use the United Nations to advance their vital national interests, and the Security Council with the permanent members and the veto powers represents the power of the superpowers. However, if one looks at the work of the specialized agencies and at the promotion of global standards in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other conventions and covenants, the goal in these agencies and these declarations is clearly cosmopolitan in intent. This might be called the cosmopolitan turn, as evidenced also by the increasing recognition that the international community has responsibility to protect people from human rights abuses within national borders (going beyond Article 2.7 of the UN Charter).28 Also, to an increasing extent, people expect the UN and its associated bodies to promote these global goals and not merely be an arena for states to play politics with each other. In the rest of this chapter, I look at several areas of international activity having to do with economic development, the environment, and peace to illustrate how, to a large degree, global ethical principles inform much of what is done in these areas—whether institutions like nation-states acting alone or through international institutions, or individuals acting alone or through civil society organizations.

APPLICATIONS Aid, Development, and International Trade The last seventy-five years have demonstrated the increasing acceptance of global responsibility by individuals and governments to tackle the challenge of world poverty. People in richer countries support or work for charities and aid agencies like Oxfam. Governments provide bilateral aid both as emergency assistance for crises caused by floods, war, famine, etc., and as development assistance aimed at creating conditions in which the poor help themselves be less poor. UN specialized agencies (e.g., FAO, UNDP, and WHO) were behind the “development decades.”29 Most of these programs, large and small, had two foci seen as largely complementary (though they can diverge), namely the reduction of extreme poverty in the world and the reduction of the gap between rich countries and poor countries. Much of the focus of these programs was on stimulating economic development, sometimes viewed simply as growth, sometimes as growth with equity. Development has seen especially since the 1980s an increasing examination by philosophers and others of what would be an adequate definition of development from an ethical point of view. Development ethics does

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provide a critique of many standard growth models of development but at the same time tries to develop a positive model of what good authentic development would look like.30 Although sometimes development ethicists have argued against any idea of a universal model of good development for communitarian or relativist reasons,31 most development ethicists will apply one of another of the global ethics theories summarized earlier. One influential theory, as advanced by Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum, and others, is the Capabilities Approach reflected in Sen’s “development is the expansion of real freedoms.”32 These freedoms are closely linked to the capabilities we each have, shaped by our education and health and generally by the social, legal, and political conditions within which we have to live. The word “real” is highly significant because it marks a major distinction to be drawn between this model of freedom and that promoted by so-called economic libertarians, for whom the central value in social life to be promoted in development is the increased freedom of individuals, who free from social and legal restrictions, should be able to do their own thing (and if this leads to gross inequalities, there is nothing actually unjust about this). One major determinant of how development occurs is international trade. Applying a cosmopolitan perspective to this means that internationally, the duties of states and indeed business companies (and so indirectly individuals who encourage or discourage such activities by their consumer preferences) are not merely to promote development through appropriate aid but to ensure that the international system and in particular economic activities promote rather than impede development and thus subject to ethical critique the effects of intellectual property rights, the use of tax heavens, trade conditionalities, and so on. A small example of how this impacts on individuals as global citizens is how they may choose to buy, where it is an option, fairly traded goods as opposed to the alternatives which may be unfairly or less fairly traded.33 Environment One thing generally recognized now is that development has to be sustainable—that is, so promoted that it protects the environment—but how much of a departure from traditional understandings of development this is remains disputed. One of the most significant ways in which ethical thinking has become global is the way environmental concerns have become central, since generally the concern of environmentalists is with the protecting of planet Earth not just some bits of it. How far we need to change the way we live and how different our conceptions of good sustainable development are depend mainly on two factors: first, our assessment of how bad the effects are of current practices on the environment, and second, the reasons we have for caring about the environment. Typically, if our ethical concern is about the present and future well-being of human beings (anthropocentrism), then the measures we advocate will be mild or radical depending on how bad current practices are—as witnessed in the recent debates about climate change. But a further source for wishing to make radical changes derives from those who would advocate a global ethic which does not merely include the good of all humans but also the value of life more generally on the planet (biocentrism) and of ecosystems/the planet as a whole (ecocentrism)—where what is needed is not merely what sustains the conditions of reasonable life for humans, but also what sustains the life conditions of other living things and the biosphere as such (reflecting the statement of Aldo Leopold: “[A] land ethic changes the role of homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it”34). The implications for global ethics and the understanding of its content have certainly dramatically changed in the last seventy-five years for environmental reasons.

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Peace Unlike concerns for development and for environmental protection, which have undoubtedly been a new and growing manifestation of global ethical concerns in the last seventy-five years, the quest for peace between nations across the world has been a constant issue in human affairs throughout recorded history—for as long as the natural tendency for groups of human has been to come into conflict with each other. What has developed in the last seventy-five years has been the need to strengthen international institutions to promote peace and the recognition of how complex peace is and how interconnected it is with other issues. The first objective of the United Nations as expressed in the Charter was that of “saving succeeding generations from the scourge of war,” a goal premised on the strengthening of international institutions achieving collective security.35 In 1991, the then Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali wrote An Agenda For Peace,36 which recognized three strands to peace— peace-making (involving intervention through the good offices of UN diplomats and others), peacekeeping (in which the UN had an important role), and peacebuilding—the process of building a more robust sustainable peace based on justice, protection of rights, and promotion of social-economic well-being for all, and, where possible, rectifying past wrongs. To the latter end of peacebuilding, the UN set up a Peacebuilding Commission in 2005.37 This is not to overlook the obvious fact that during this period there have been many serious conflicts. But the latter does not undermine the point that the quest for peace has become more internationally coordinated, more sophisticated, and premised on recognizing the universal value of peace and the responsibility to promote it anywhere.

CONCLUDING COMMENT All three of the broad global concerns I have mentioned perfectly illustrate why a global ethic is imperative in the twenty-first century but also why it has a changed emphasis from the past. It is increasingly recognized that we need as part of a reasonable global ethic to acknowledge and welcome diversities of cultures, understandings of what human well-being consists in, and the philosophies/theologies that lie behind them. This development of global ethics makes it stand apart from global ethics in the past, which tended to present universal visions of human well-being that were highly specific and at odds with those of others. But a modern global ethic is also premised on the recognition that there are certain common conditions that are essential for all people, whatever their diverse ways of life and more specific values, and it is the responsibility of all to see that those conditions are promoted. Among those common conditions are clearly (along with other things like respect for human rights) adequate socioeconomic standards, healthy and balanced environments, and stability and peace. In many ways, peace is the most important precondition of them all.

NOTES 1 Aristotle, The Politics (c. 350 BC), ed. Stephen Everson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 2 Hugo Grotius, De iure ac pacis (On the Law of War and Peace) (1625), trans. Francis W. Kelsey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925). 3 For a useful analysis of the three different approaches, see Bull Hedley, The Anarchical Society (London: Macmillan, 1977).

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4 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), ch. 13. 5 For his general approach to ethics, see Immanuel Kant, “The Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785),” in The Moral Law, trans. Henry Paton (London: Hutcheson, 1949). 6 Kant’s cosmopolitanism is explicitly discussed in Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace (1795)” and “The Idea for a Universal History with Cosmopolitan Intent (1786),” both in Kant’s Political Writings, trans. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). 7 See, for example, James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, eds., Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideal (Boston, MA: The MIT Press, 1997). 8 United Nations (UN), Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: United Nations, 1948). 9 The Council for Education in World Citizenship, founded in 1939, http://www.hubcymru.org.uk/ cewc/?module=render&file=cewc/index.html. 10 See, e.g., Jonathan Cohen, The Principles of World Citizenship (Oxford: Blackwell, 1954); Derek Heater, World Citizenship (London: Continuum, 2002). 11 Hans Küng, Global Responsibility: In Search of a New World Ethic (London: SCM Press, 1990). See also Nigel Dower, World Ethics: The New Agenda (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998). 12 See, e.g., Edinburgh University Press, Studies in World Ethics series (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997). The series was later renamed, significantly, Studies in Global Ethics. 13 Parliament of the World’s Religions, “Declaration Toward a Global Ethic,” in A Global Ethic: The Declaration of the Parliament of the World’s Religions, eds. Hans Küng and Karl-Josef Kuschel (London: SCM Press, 1993). 14 See, e.g., Charles R. Beitz et al., eds., International Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). 15 See Yersu Kim, A Common Framework for the Ethics of the 21st Century (Paris: UNESCO Division of Philosophy and Ethics, 1999); and UNESCO, “Universality: A European Vision?” UNESCO Courier (July 2002). 16 See Jan-Aart Scholte, Globalization: A Critical Introduction (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000). 17 Peter Singer, One World: The Ethics of Globalization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). 18 Compare the approach of Henry Shue, Basic Rights Subsistence, Affluence, and US Foreign Policy, 2nd edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996) and that of Robert Nozick, Anarchy State and Utopia (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974). 19 Charles R. Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). 20 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971). 21 See next section for how different religious perspectives feed into a global ethic. 22 Commission on Global Governance (CGG), Our Global Neighbourhood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 23 Earth Council, Earth Charter (Costa Rica: Earth Council, 2002), www.earthcharter.org/. It illustrates well what Parekh refers to: see note 24. 24 Bhikhu Parekh, “Principles of a Global Ethic,” in Global Ethics & Civil Society, eds. John Eade and Darren O’Byrne (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 27. 25 For an analysis of the concept, see Nigel Dower, Introduction to Global Citizenship (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003). For a survey of issues, see Joshua Cohen, ed., For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism (Boston: Beacon Books, 1996). 26 See, e.g., Jonathan Cohen, The Principles of World Citizenship (Oxford: Blackwell, 1954). 27 See, e.g., Daniele Archibugi and David Held, eds., Cosmopolitan Democracy: An Agenda for a New World Order (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995). 28 United Nations (UN), Responsibility to Protect, A/RES/60/1 (New York: United Nations, 2005); and United Nations (UN), Charter of the United Nations (New York: United Nations, 1945), Art. 2.7. 29 See also the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Human Development Reports (New York: United Nations, 1990–2019).

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30 Two organizations have been prominent in this: first, the International Development Ethics Association (founded 1987), https://developmentethics.org/; and later the Human Development & Capabilities Association (founded 2004), https://hd-ca.org/. 31 See Wolfgang Sachs, ed., The Development Dictionary (London: Zed Books, 1992). 32 Amartya Sen, Development and Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 1. 33 See https://www.fairtrade.org.uk/What-is-Fairtrade/Who-we-are. 34 Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949), 224. 35 See, e.g., the Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues (ICDSI) Common Security: A Programme for Disarmament (London: Pan Books, 1982). 36 Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Agenda for Peace (New York: United Nations, 1992). 37 See Peacebuilding Commission (2005), http://unacov.uk/un-peacebuilding-commission/.

WORKS CITED Archibugi, Daniele, and David Held, eds. Cosmopolitan Democracy: An Agenda for a New World Order. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995. Aristotle. The Politics (c. 350 BC). Ed. Stephen Everson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Beitz, Charles R., et al., eds. International Ethics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Beitz, Charles R. Political Theory and International Relations. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. Bohman, James, and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, eds. Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideal. Boston MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1997. Boutros-Ghali, Boutros. Agenda for Peace. New York: United Nations, 1992. Bull, Hedley. The Anarchical Society. London: Macmillan, 1977. Cohen Jonathan. The Principles of World Citizenship. Oxford: Blackwell, 1954. Cohen Joshua, ed. For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism. Boston: Beacon Books, 1996. Commission on Global Governance (CGG). Our Global Neighbourhood. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Dower, Nigel. Introduction to Global Citizenship. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003. Dower, Nigel. World Ethics: The New Agenda. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998. Earth Council. Earth Charter. Costa Rica: Earth Council. 2002. www.earthcharter.org/. Edinburgh University Press. Studies in World Ethics series. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997. Fairtrade Foundation. “Who We Are.” Fairtrade Foundation (n.d.). https://www.fairtrade.org.uk/ What-is-Fairtrade/Who-we-are. Grotius, Hugo. De iure belli as pacis (On the Law of War and Peace) (1625). Trans. Francis W. Kelsey. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925. Heater, Derek. World Citizenship. London: Continuum, 2002. Hedley, Bull. The Anarchical Society. London: Macmillan, 1977. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan (1651). Ed. Richard Tuck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Human Development & Capabilities Association (HDCA). https://hd-ca.org/. International Development Ethics Association (IDEA). https://developmentethics.org/. Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues (ICDSI). Common Security: A Programme for Disarmament. London: Pan Books, 1982. Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949. Kant, Immanuel. “The Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785).” In The Moral Law. Trans. Henry Paton. London: Hutcheson, 1949. Kant, Immanuel. “The Idea for a Universal History with Cosmopolitan Intent (1786).” In Kant: Political Writings. Trans. Hans Reiss. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970.

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Kant, Immanuel. “Perpetual Peace (1795).” In Kant: Political Writings. Trans. Hans Reiss. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Kim, Yersu. A Common Framework for the Ethics of the 21st Century. Paris: UNESCO Division of Philosophy and Ethics, 1999. Küng, Hans. Global Responsibility: In Search of a New World Ethic. London: SCM Press, 1990. Nozick, Robert. Anarchy State and Utopia. Oxford: Blackwell, 1974. Parekh, Bhikhu. “Principles of a Global Ethic.” In Global Ethics & Civil Society. Eds. John Eade and Darren O’Byrne. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Parliament of the World’s Religions. “Declaration toward a Global Ethic.” In A Global Ethic: The Declaration of the Parliament of the World’s Religions. Eds. Hans Küng and Karl-Josef Kuschel. London: SCM Press, 1993. Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971. Sachs, Wolfgang. The Development Dictionary. London: Zed Books, 1992. Sen, Amartya. Development and Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Scholte, Jan-Aart. Globalization: A Critical Introduction. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000. Shue, Henry. Basic Rights: Subsistence Affluence and US Foreign Policy. Second Edition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Singer, Peter. One World: The Ethics of Globalization. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. The Council for Education in World Citizenship. http://www.hubcymru.org.uk/ cewc/?module=render&file=cewc/index.html. UNESCO. “Universality: a European vision?” UNESCO Courier (July 2002). United Nations (UN). Charter of the United Nations. New York: United Nations, 1945. United Nations (UN). Peace Building Commission. http://unacov.uk/un-peacebuilding-commission/. United Nations (UN). Responsibility to Protect. A/RES/60/1. New York: United Nations, 2005. United Nations (UN). Universal Declaration of Human Rights. New York United Nations, 1948. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Human Development Reports. New York: United Nations, 1990-2019.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Worlding Art NIKOS PAPASTERGIADIS

HORIZONS, WORLDS … That line between sky and sea, very, very far away, had always seemed the end of the world; could it be that there is another world beyond that line? And then another one beyond that? What kind of world might it be?1 Blue, black, and bright white specks that sparkle and cluster. Night sky. Then dawn.2 There are stars exploding around you and there is nothing you can do.3 On the earth two blues of sky and sea meet at a vanishing point, and time exposed.4 Whether we are looking up, across, or down, we are, as Blaise Pascal, the seventeenthcentury philosopher and scientist, noted, “suspended between two infinities.”5 The further out we look, the bigger the horizon. The closer in we reflect, the more complex the detail. In both directions, there is the experience of the boundless. The horizon is awesome; it holds both the dread of the void and the delight in other possibilities. Inside the translucence of a tiny seashell twirls another kind of wonder. The historian and geographer Patricia Seed noted that celestial maps preceded the terrestrial variety by a millennia: “The earliest maps sought to locate humans in the universe.”6 In Anaximander’s map of the world, it was the Mediterranean Sea, not the territory of Europe, Asia, or Africa that occupies the center: “The sea was the conductor of the improbable radiance of Antiquity.”7 Ever since humans opened their eyes and contemplated the meaning of the universe, these two perspectives—the horizontal and vertical, zooming out and zooming in, have dominated the vision of the world. In Jitish Kalat’s video installation, Forensic Trail of a Grand Banquet (2012), he utilizes X-ray photography to trace 700 food items as they undertake an intestinal journey. The flux of tiny bits of samosas and kachoris in our gut resembles the nebulae above us. Trevor Paglen uses astrophotography to visualize the spy satellites amid the stars—The Other Night Sky (2007)—and dives into the deep sea to yield murky images of the fiber-optic cables that transmit the traffic for the internet: Undersea Cable (2019). The different uses of forensic and spherical photography provide an uncanny insight into the proximity of the microscopic and the macroscopic. Contemporary art is often pitched as the first truly world art: “[I]t comes from the world, and frequently tries to imagine the world as a differentiated yet inevitably connected whole.”8 However, the mapping of world art is often filtered through regional perspectives or restrictive formal categories.9 Is it possible to survey, let alone categorize, the flows and

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flux of contemporary art when artists like Liam Gillick insist that its aim is to blur genres and transgress boundaries, and how can we see the world through an artist’s life when the artist declares that his or her story resists classification?10 The traitless and boundless worlds that are manifest in contemporary art have, so far, eluded the art historical schemata of periodization and thematic categorization. In a small way, the anxiety of endlessness and multiplicity in art now resembles the awesome and dreadful experience of world as sublime. The concept of the sublime is a stumbling block for modern philosophy, whereas the experience of the sublime is a recurring starting point in art. How is the worldmaking in art a form of knowledge, and what is the best means to make sense of it? Of course, there are always a variety of world depictions and world perceptions, most spurious and some significant. The point is not to return to the debate on whether the perception of the world is dependent on a concept of the world. Similarly, my aim is not to ascertain the formal properties or organization principle by which a world is manifest in art. Rather, my goal is to pick up the injunction that worldmaking always comes from other worlds.11 It is a way of reordering the world by cutting, mixing, and highlighting the different worlds. In this chapter, the world of and for art will be approached through a dialogue with the cosmos in cosmopolitanism. It will aim to reclaim the link between the aesthetics and physics of cosmopolitanism and thereby decenter the role of ethics and politics that dominated in the modern and contemporary theories on cosmopolitanism. The cosmos is sublime. Cosmopolitanism is an idea that expresses a connection to the whole world and an ideal of fellowship with all people. At its most utopian level, cosmopolitanism proclaims a form of belonging that is free of political boundaries and extends our sensory awareness to the limits of the cosmos. It proposes the widest possible sphere of belonging and freedom. In Greek, the word cosmos has three levels of meaning: 1. Cosmos—as aesthetic: an assemblage that pleases, an alluring use of language, a construction of space that is hospitable to others; 2. Cosmos—as cosmology: a sphere that surrounds the earth and separates it from the boundless universe; 3. Cosmos—as politics, ethics, and philosophy: the category to which all humanity belongs.

THE VEXED SALIENCE OF COSMOPOLITANISM Suddenly, in the early 2000s, the beautiful concept of cosmopolitanism got a bad name. As Craig Calhoun noted: only a decade before, “all the talk was about cosmopolitanism of everyday life, cosmopolitan democracy, and the ever greater advance of supra-national unity in Europe.”12 After the attacks on 9/11, cosmopolitanism was snared in the ambient wars on refugees and terror.13 Then the European project began to falter, inequality within nations deepened as the gaps between them narrowed, and cosmopolitanism, with its fundamental features of intellectual openness, cross-cultural hospitality, and political solidarity, was not just stripped of any prospect of realization, but denigrated as a divisive and delusional fantasy. The neo-nationalist politicians poured scorn on the ancient ideals of cosmopolitanism and mocked the emergent policies on multiculturalism as examples of both the hopeless humanitarian ideology and the launching pad for terrorist networks that will fragment national culture and destroy territorial sovereignty. In the equally cynical but less paranoid centrist discourses that champion neoliberalism, cosmopolitanism was cherry-picked, and some rosy metaphors were plucked to promote the benefits of diversity and open markets for global corporations. Among the happy globetrotting art fair crowd, the idea of cosmopolitanism was

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also used to justify their appetite for novelty and demonstrate the ever widening spectrum of their good taste. Cosmopolitanism also came under fire from philosophers who claimed that it either pacified the public14 or that it was complicit with cultural homogenization.15 How did cosmopolitanism get trumped by neo-nationalism, confused with the McDonaldization of culture, and turned into a camouflage for the advance of neoliberalism? Yet, as the world becomes more interconnected, the challenges of global cohabitation, planetary survival, and cross-cultural exchange became even more pressing. These structural transformations gave scholars the idea that the time for cosmopolitanism had arrived. No one could ignore the prevalence of conflicts such as the wars that led to the breakup of Yugoslavia, or the militarization of borders in order to keep migrants out. However, we also began to witness the emergence of worldwide activist networks and institutional movements that called for global strategies to address the environmental risks, develop legal instruments that can ensure justice for all, organize an acceptable balance between the rights of mobility and sovereignty, as well as find a non-ethnocentric framework for reconciling universalism and cultural differentiation. These global challenges became entangled with the ancient philosophical ideals of cosmopolitanism. Postcolonial theorists argued that cosmopolitanism was an ideal worthy of global application, and given a new pluralist perspective, it was adaptable to contemporary circumstances.16 A key slogan of this era was “think global act local.” Issues that were once confined to national borders were now catapulted onto a world stage. In the eighteenth century, the brilliant philosopher Immanuel Kant described cosmopolitanism as both the “greatest problem for the human species” and the “final question” that humanity must answer.17 The new generation of scholars who wanted to build on Kant’s legacy argued that the values of cosmopolitanism should come to the foreground first and foremost in reconfiguring democracy. It was envisaged that just as democracy was previously extended from a model for a city-state to a political system that could encompass a vast continental republic, it could also be transformed to embrace a transnational sphere. There was no inherent reason why political institutions could not address the challenges of global migration, multicultural communities, and the flight of capital. Similarly, there was no logical obstacle to extending the territory of democracy from city to region, and then finally to a global scale. In one of the most optimistic voices of this generation, Ulrich Beck called for a cosmopolitan consciousness and planetary awareness, and for cosmopolitans to unite not just as citizens of the world but also as citizens for the world.18 Justice may be more effective and efficient when its instruments are close at hand, but it is not necessarily always best served at the local level. One of the most ambitious efforts to think through the cosmopolitan project was found in the essays by the German political philosopher Jürgen Habermas.19 Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the expansion of the European Union, Habermas claimed that it was necessary to rebuild the foundations of cosmopolitan justice. Habermas was aware that the catastrophes of the twentieth century went against the grain of the Enlightenment project, but he still argued that Kant’s vision, with some adjustment, could serve as a viable framework for a renewed cosmopolitan political agenda. Cosmopolitan institutions would succeed where national institutions would either fall short or crumble in the wake of globalizing tendencies. At the core of Habermas’s project was the idea that a form of cosmopolitan patriotism would override “dead” nationalism and accommodate the constitutive differences of contemporary society. However, this worthy effort gained neither institutional traction nor scholarly consensus. Theorists pointed out that the tensions in Kant’s philosophy resurfaced

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in Habermas’s account, and furthermore, the institutional mechanisms for delivering and supporting a cosmo-polity have not only failed to materialize, but the political will to realize these ideals was in retreat.20 These conclusions are paradoxical because while there was more and more evidence of the cosmopolitanization of society, there was also a growing disconnect, if not an outright deficit in the cosmopolitical project. The cosmopolitan backlash was more than the last gasp of desperate energy from the vested interest of dead nationalism. It was also a product of the intellectual failure to grasp the function of the imaginary in both political discourse and everyday life. The contemporary advocates of cosmopolitanism confined themselves to a rather narrow normative model. This was not always the case. In the pre-Enlightenment era, cosmopolitanism was an ideal that addressed and sometimes combined spiritual connection, moral obligation, political responsibility, and aesthetic wonder. The earliest expressions of universal belonging and human fellowship were found in ancient Egypt, China, Greece, and India. Homer used the concept of cosmos with dazzling diversity. Euripides gave profound emphasis on the empathy for others, and Herodotus was a brilliant pioneer in cross-cultural evaluation. However, it was a group of strangers from the edges of the Hellenistic empire that gathered in a stoa in Athens, who were the first to give a more robust and fulsome theory of cosmopolitanism. The Stoics put forward a vision of radical equality that connected our terrestrial lives with celestial images of a circumambient ether and a thrusting cosmic fire. The cosmos was also imagined as a celestial city where gods and sages resided, and from which we derived our capacity to create and discover truth. To become a cosmopolitan one needed to achieve an exquisite state of attunement with the cosmos. The authors of these visions rejoiced in these elegant musical metaphors but also admitted that this celestial order was beyond our immediate reach. Yet they could neither explain the sublime interweaving of the moral with the beautiful, nor account for the mysterious energy of creativity without it. In these early visions of cosmopolitanism, the idea did not begin from a moral imperative but through a strange mixture of cosmology and aesthesis that I call the creative constitutive. Cosmopolitanism began in physics and aesthetics; ethics was there as well, but mostly as a second-order category. In Plato’s Timaeus, the moment of creation is unequivocal. First there is chaos, and then the Demiurge introduces order and makes a cosmos. While no modern philosopher or political theorist has grounded their project firmly on the early cosmopolitan foundations, there is another group who has never fully renounced what I call the spherical imaginary that is central to cosmopolitanism. From early modernist artists to contemporary figures in the art world, there is a perduring fascination with the cosmos. These “agents of the cosmos” are not bound by the rules of empirical verification and normative conduct. In fact, the sphere of aesthetics means that, in their mind, and through their art, they figuratively live in, and literally make other worlds. Kazimir Malevich, the pioneering modernist artist, was not at all embarrassed by the ancient aim to be in harmony with the spheres.21 The contemporary artist Tomás Saraceno’s attention is atmospheric, and he asserts that the elevation from the quotidian to the sidereal is an opportunity to reorient intelligence and integrate sensory perception. Working with flying machines, investigating communication systems among other species, and charting the flows of the weather are thus part of a process of “facilitating more degrees of communication among ourselves.”22 Hence, the scope of art is not an exercise in magical thinking but extends all the way to reimaging the “full ecosystemic relations where future cloud cities could form”23 and reconnecting with ancient agricultural practices and the material energy in the “cosmic solar realm.”24

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It is absurd to dismiss the authenticity of artistic claims, just as it is impossible to ignore the flashes of genuine cosmopolitan sociality in everyday life.25 Agency and institutional presence may lack the meat and concrete of rival positions, but cosmopolitanism is not confined to the deluded and misguided. Gerardo Mosquera, the founding director of the Havana Biennial, in full awareness that art institutions are captive to the pragmatic realism of civic stakeholders and that ephemeral art events have at best speckled legacies, also stressed that large art events cannot commence without a high degree of idealism.26 The effort to translate the local and the global in the context of contemporary art may have varying effects:27 the attempts to articulate a global self appears to only gain a flickering form,28 and the elevation of the art fora as platforms to bridge the worlds may only sometimes offer a glimpse into new forms of hospitality,29 but nevertheless the irrepressible fact repeats itself, and with each event the dream of cosmopolitanism is inflated once again, as if for the first time! I am not troubled by the grandiosity of artistic claims; on the contrary, I am more disturbed by the efforts of philosophers and cultural theorists to strip back aesthetics or denounce idealism.30 These critics take pride in reminding us that the values of cosmopolitanism lack infrastructure and supporting systems. They complain that aesthetic claims slide “unwittingly” between local and global, blurring the particular and the universal, and they rebuke artists who dare to claim to be both at home in a specific place and somehow “floating” above all places. For all their muscular vigor, these critics have not paused and asked themselves whether their ideological stridency is both alienating artists from theory and asphyxiating the concept of world. It has done little to advance the sociological theory of worldview Weltanschauung that was defined by Karl Mannheim,31 or extend Ernst Bloch’s concept of experimentum mundi,32 and deepen Georg Lukács’s term Geistesgeschichte that was developed to consider the way art was not just a reflection of economic or political forces but was a system of social interaction in itself.33 Marx expressed this paradoxical relationship between the thought and worldliness in one of his early essays, when he stressed that “[t]he consequence, hence, is that the worlds becoming philosophical is at the same time philosophy’s becoming worldly, that its realization is at the same time its loss.”34 It would be more helpful if the British and American critical theorists who have debunked the delusions and exposed the ambivalences of cosmopolitanism paid closer attention to Henri Lefebvre’s invocation to examine the interplay between the conceptual and the real, for, as he stressed, “[t]he world becomes world, becoming what virtual it was. It transforms itself by becoming world-wide.”35 Critical theory from the South has been more nuanced in terms of its links to cosmology and has done much more to produce new regional mappings of the armatures of political solidarity. To step out of the stigmatic associations with cosmopolitanism, we must not only cease the trade in caricatures but also widen the conceptual frame beyond the normative paradigm.36 Even when cosmopolitanism has been deployed to explore the context of contemporary art, the emphasis has been on the polity and not the cosmos of art. The political function of aesthetic cosmopolitanism has been situated in both materialist and idealist frameworks. For instance, Terry Smith’s mapping of contemporary art is influenced by the a perspective that distinguishes between superstructure and base. Contemporary art is part of the superstructure that brings forth to the world an allegory of its own material existence in the base of contemporaneity. However, this materialist theory of contemporary art is complicated by its own empirical observations. Smith’s detailed portraits of contemporary art show that the world picture is not just a reflection of the condition of contemporaneity but also a manifestation of contested and hybrid world pictures. Multiplicity in the world of contemporary art debunks the Enlightenment version of universalism, and the diasporic consciousness of contemporary

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artists is not reducible to the alienation complex in modernity. This suggests the emergence of a more baffling and “larger cosmopolitanism.”37 There was also an idealist tendency to collapse and conflate the aims and motivations of artists and activists as exemplars of ethical conduct in worldly fellowship. In doing so, it was assumed that cosmopolitanism was a singular and unifying feature in art and politics. That is, when artists were making art that conveyed universal belonging, when activists protested against the violence of border politics and adopted a humanitarian stance to express fellowship with refugees, it was assumed that all these actors were drawing from a common ideal, and that they were referring to a condition that is one and the same for everyone. The cosmopolitan imaginary in art was thus not articulated in aesthetic terms but seen as either representing a new universalism or as a partner in humanitarian political movements. This is not to claim that the artistic will to experimentation and dogged perversity is utterly detached from the social and the political. On the contrary, artists have shown a remarkable talent for pursuing a cosmopolitan agenda by intervening in civic institutions and hijacking transnational structures.38 I will argue that cosmopolitanism is central to the worldmaking activity of visual artists. Thus, my aim is to both recall some of the widest visions of cosmopolitanism by the philosophers of antiquity and link them to the artistic visions of contemporaneity. It may also seem bizarre at first, but the link between aesthetics and cosmopolitanism is also found in physics. It is in cosmological physics that we also see the first insights into cosmopolitanism. It is also no coincidence that the reflections by contemporary physicists are once again opening the big questions of life, belonging, and creation. There can be no world theory without a theory of creation.

SCOPING COSMOS + POLITY Cosmopolitanism, in general terms, is a simple idea that expresses the possibility for human fellowship. It encompasses a range of different perspectives.39 It refers to a belief that all humans are equal and therefore all strangers must be treated with dignity. In its radical forms, cosmopolitanism shows no regard for race, class, and gender. This is the ethical perspective on cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism also refers to a claim for universal belonging. It proclaims that as all people live in a singular world, then their primary allegiance should be to upholding universal laws rather than the particular customs and rules of a specific city or territory. It calls for a system of world governance. This is the political perspective on cosmopolitanism. Most contemporary discussions on cosmopolitanism revolve around these two dimensions. They are concerned with the rules of conduct and systems of governance that sustain equality and justice. These two perspectives are central to the articulation of normative cosmopolitanism. However, cosmopolitanism extends further. It is more than a model for ethical norms and political systems. Cosmopolitanism also draws on the human capacity for empathy for the plight of others, openness towards difference, and curiosity over the mysteries in the world. These subjective capacities link cosmopolitanism to the willingness to see the world from a stranger’s perspective, to consider alternative options, and explore the limits of knowledge. Stepping out of habituated and provincial ways of thinking and developing perspectival understandings of the world are expressions of the affective and cultural perspectives on cosmopolitanism.

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However, the biggest claim of cosmopolitanism is one that sees continuum between human nature, our worldly environment, and the cosmos. These three subjects are not seen as separate from each other but are entangled and composed of the same basic stuff. Thus, to live in harmony with nature is not just environmental concern for biological survival but also an extrapolation of the material composition into moral order and an expression of the ultimate cosmic connectedness. This cosmic connection of cosmopolitanism is not posthumanist. We can thus see two cosmopolitan paradigms—the normative with its moral imperative and the aesthetic through its creative constitutive. The moral imperative and the creative constitutive are two very different points for understanding cosmopolitanism. They neither arise from a common motivation nor overlap in scope. Despite the growing sophistication in the anthropological debates on global culture and cultural hybridity, the political critique of globalization and neoliberalism, the humanitarian perspectives on the global migration crises, and the advances in methodological cosmopolitanism, there is very little attention to the link between cosmopolitanism and creation. With the ascendancy of economic globalization, the aesthetics of cosmopolitanism has been glossed. However, it is not as if these shortcomings, missed opportunities, and wrong directions occurred without warning. As early as the 1950s, Kostas Axelos, a Greek intellectual based in Paris, distinguished between globalization as a reference to the material ways in which the world is technologically and commercially integrated and what he called a worldly activity of mondialization.40 In the journal Arguments that Axelos edited between 1958 and 1962, he invited contributors to respond not only to the global spread of social processes, ethical issues, and economic structures but proposed the need to rethink the link between the world and creativity. In the 1960 manifesto, they divided the issue of the journal into two sections, one of which was called “The Becoming-Thought of the World and the Becoming-Worldly of Thought.” Mondialization is also one of the key concepts advanced by the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy,41 and with reference to the paintings by On Kawara, he also notes that the spacing of time is an effort to keep open the order of the world: “All art is cosmological.”42

THE PROBLEM OF CREATION IN ART HISTORY Herbert Read was the last critic to champion the idea of the artist as Promethean creator. Johan Gottfried von Herder, one of Read’s favorite philosophers, claimed that the artist is a “sacred vessel through which blows the spirit of his time and place and society; he is the man who conveys as far as possible a total human experience, a world.”43 Read himself would be even more bold in his claims about the role of the artist as a mediator in divine creation: “[A]n artist for the community’s sake becomes priest and king, for he is the maker of magic, the voice of the spirits, the inspired oracle, the intermediary through whom the tribe secures fertility for their crops for their hunters. His hand is veritably the hand of God.”44 More recently, and certainly in more guarded terms, the American art historian Thomas Crow claimed that the era of “idolatry” may not be over, and he summoned the reinstatement of a theological hermeneutic, with its attendant priestly hierarchies of knowledge transfer.45 Foundational thinkers in art history such as Aby Warburg and Ernst Gombrich were more nuanced. Warburg believed that images were not just records of a specific time and place but had a capacity to resonate across history, and for Gombrich, who was more ambivalent in his conclusions, the function of the artist would “oscillate between construing the object as a

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nexus of relationships with ties to the entire system of culture and seeing it as a medium or intermediary between creator and audience.”46 John Berger was one of the pioneering critics to cut through idealism. While not confining himself to the crisp air of empiricism, Berger was, like Walter Benjamin, suspicious of whatever “lurks in the humid backroom of spiritualism.”47 At the early stages of his career as an art critic, Berger argued that the function of the imagination was not to invent alternate realities but to see through the distortions of power and “disclose that which exists.”48 The materialist turn in art theory found its most pithy definition in the opening page of Janet Wolff’s Social Production of Art: “Art is a social product.”49 In the decades that followed, the exploration of the relationship between art and creation stories all but disappeared. The prevailing orthodoxy in cultural theory and visual studies has included a rejection of the proposition that the Promethean artist has the divine authority to stand above social and political forces. Debunking mystic pretensions was easy work, but in the conclusion of Janet Wolff’s second book she conceded that she was “agnostic” over the capacity of theory to capture aesthetic value, and accepted that “art also retains an autonomy with regard to the specifically aesthetic nature of the apprehension and enjoyment of works of art.”50 To his credit, Berger also confessed to being both a “bad Marxist” and an incurable “romantic.”51 Such a confession amounts to more than a quirk in Berger’s personal outlook. It is also a discursive marker of the problem in explaining creation. While feminist and Marxist approaches have made many gains in exposing bias and exclusionary structures, they are yet to deliver an adequate explanation of the creative process. In order to rebut Thomas Crow’s critique that the materialist turn has been nothing more than a facile detour and self-cannibalizing determinism, it is necessary to not collapse the question why is a specific aesthetic object so compelling at this point in time into an excavation of what the material circumstances of its making are and an identification of the formal techniques or the how it was made. Toward the end of his life, Berger was fascinated by the enigmatic conjunction of hospitality and ordering in art. Any critic that has followed an artist’s development will also notice a peculiar reiteration. It is a coiling movement of replay and shift that is traced in the reworking of core motifs in different subjects. This process of recurrence is often attributed to the impetus from a psychological drive or as part of ongoing political struggles. Yet the inside and outside of art are entangled in a more complex manner. In numerous essays, Berger returned to the way an artist is driven by the need to create a sense of place.52 This idea of place is both cosmos as topos (sphere) and cosmos as tropos (order). The place is not deduced by any formal set of perspectival rules, nor is it locatable through the content of a cultural code. In relation to the sense of place in painting, Berger suggests that the experience of recognition is paradoxical: it is not dependent on the familiarity with geographic contours, as its organizations are drawn from an unspecified point of origin: The painter is continually trying to discover, to stumble upon, the place which will contain and surround his present act of painting. Ideally there should be as many places as there are paintings. The trouble is that a painting often fails to become a place. … When a place is found it is found somewhere on the frontier between nature and art. It is like a hollow in the sand within which the frontier has been wiped out. The place of the painting begins in this hollow. Begins with a practice, with something being done by the hands, and the hands then seeking approval of the eye, until the whole body is involved in the hollow.53

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ART BEFORE AND AFTER SCIENCE Anaximander’s fragment, which is credited as the first philosophical saying, is an explanation of the origin of life and universe. The material cause and the first element were the infinite. “Whence things have their origin, there they must also pass away according to necessity; for they must pay penalty and be judged for their injustices according to the ordinances of time.”54 Philosophy began as cosmology. Stephen Hawking once quipped that philosophy was dead.55 Even when Hawking was making a joke, he was also delivering a serious point. To him, philosophy appeared to be trapped in the funnel of specialization, and he extolled physics to take over the mantle for zooming in on the origin of creation and zooming out to explore the nature of the cosmos. Paraphrasing Albert Einstein, he went on to say that “the incomprehensible fact of the universe is that it is comprehensible.” Universal laws, if they exist, are not remote and abstract; they are already in the here and now, actively shaping everything. Such a law is neither external to things, nor imposed from above. Hence, we are not subject to law but are formed through it, and as such, our intelligence— the tools with which we investigate it—are in turn formed by it. The capacity to discern the existence of such a law is not only the ultimate attainment that our intelligence can deliver, but it presents itself more in terms of revelation. This law does not appear as if it exists out there but also as a process that is inside. Hence, Hawking could declare, on the one hand, black holes reveal a “deep harmony underlying nature,” and on the other hand, this harmony is only “model dependent.”56 In short, nature is not just out there but also in our minds. The physicist Paul Davies makes this point with stunning elegance when he claims that our capacity to understand the cosmos is because of the “resonance between the human mind and the underlying organization of the natural world.”57 If such a resonance exists, does this mean that our mind and the universe share common properties? Are our ways of thinking about its formation also an expression of our companionship with its making? Davies is certainly of the view that there is a possible analogy in the structure of the mind and the cosmos and a complex feedback system shapes both. He thereby asks: “If human reasoning reflects something of the structure of the physical world, would it be true to say that the world is a manifestation of reason?”58 One stares out not only in awe and wonder but also as if there is a profound sense of connection, being at home and being inextricably linked. This is not an alienating experience of seeing a complexity that is external to your being, but an engagement with what is common to everything. The ancient Greek philosophers had an outlook that was very different from the mechanical schemata that dominated early modern science: “The ancient view is centered on the realm of living beings, its kosmos is composed of qualitative powers (such as hot and cold, dry and wet) that are thoroughly familiar to our everyday experience, and its unifying structure takes the form of a harmonious community of opponents dwelling together under law.”59 If the cosmos was the seat of logos and source of creation, then it meant that the living force in nature, and the human capacity to imagine other possibilities and grasp the truth, was a result of the complex interconnection between the cosmos and the world soul. From a humanist perspective, the imagination is an exercise in diving deep into the wells of the unconscious or surveying the neighboring fields. From a cosmic perspective the function of the imagination is more like a tuning machine.60 Can the imagination, which is at best only partial, and a fragment of its whole, pick up sparks and signals that are far way out there?61

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These are the questions that bind Anaximander with contemporary physicists like Davies and Hawking. Like the ancient Greeks, who had the temerity to invent rascal gods and the narcissistic self-belief that, in turn, the humans could seduce and beguile the gods, the contemporary physicists also presume that an understanding of how the universe operates is also a way of gaining some influence in it.62 This perspective on the cosmos suggests that we are neither controlling masters nor passive subjects. It is an agonistic perspective, in which humans are common to the cosmos. We are in it, and this makes us agents in the shaping of it. Hence, we return to the ancient divide between aesthesis and knowledge. Hawking stated that there is no picture or theory of world that is independent of the concept or perspective through which it is formed. He rejected both realist viewpoints, which assume an external existence and proof of it is simply dependent on a tool that is big or fine enough to measure it, and the anti-realist viewpoints, which asserted that reality can only be empirically demonstrable when our approach is free of theoretical preconceptions. By contrast, Hawking proposed: “Our observation—and hence the observations upon which our theories are based—is not direct, but rather is shaped by a kind of lens, the interpretative structure of our human minds.”63 Companionship is key to understanding cosmology. The moral imperative and the creative constitutive are two very different points for understanding cosmopolitanism. They neither overlap nor share a fixed center. Aesthetic cosmopolitanism is by comparison to normative cosmopolitanism wildly speculative, murky in its outlines, and boundless in its aspirations. It is important to stress that aesthetic cosmopolitanism is neither in opposition nor a supplement to normative cosmopolitanism. It is also not a request for a discrete and clean space in which art pursues its own miniutopia. Transgressive and fanciful projects are all too often tolerated within the zoo-like confines of art. However, they are rendered suspect when extended to matters of governance and sociality. In our public lives, we seemingly demand a more transparent and predictable kind of order. But then again, a cosmopolitanism without the cosmos is just not catching on. And how do we define an agenda that can both zoom out to address global migration, climate change, and world justice and also zoom in to appreciate the value of deep habits, old languages, and local landscapes? Patriotic nationalism seems like a great idea, as long as you do not have to think about it. While cosmopolitan patriotism is an oxymoron, there is not much point to life if you have not lived it as a cosmopolite.

NOTES 1 Ryszard Kapuscinski, Travels with Herodotus (New York: Vintage, 2008), 259. 2 Sol LeWitt, Sunrise and Sunset at Praiano (New York: Rizzoli, 1980). 3 Ragnar Kjartanson, “The Visitors,” YouTube, February 8, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=qOxG711lb0E. 4 Hiroshi Sugimoto, Seascapes (Bologna: Damiani, 2018). 5 Qtd. in Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics II, trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2011), 12. 6 Patricia Seed, The Oxford Map Companion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), xix. 7 Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (London: Verso, 1974), 21. 8 Terry Smith, Contemporary Arts: World Currents (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2011), 8. 9 Kitty Zijlmans and Wilfried Van Damme, eds., World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2008); Nicolas Bourriaud, Altermodern (London: Tate Triennial, 2009); and Thierry De Duve, Look!: 100 Years of Contemporary Art (Brussels: Palais des Beaux-Arts, 2002).

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10 Liam Gillick, “Contemporary Art Does Not Account for That Which is Taking Place,” e-flux (December 2010), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/21/67664/contemporary-art-does-not-accountfor-that-which-is-taking-place/. 11 Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1978), 6. 12 Craig Calhoun, Is There Anything Left after Global Spectacles and Local Events? (Melbourne: RUPC pamphlets, 2017). 13 Nikos Papastergiadis, Cosmopolitanism and Culture (Polity Press: Cambridge, 2012). 14 Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics (London: Verso, 2013). 15 Peter Sloterdijk, In the World Interior of Capital, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013). 16 Carol A. Breckenridege, Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, eds., Cosmopolitanism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Jan Nederveen Pieterse, “Emancipatory Cosmopolitanism: Towards an Agenda,” Development and Change 37.6 (2006): 1247–57; Seyla Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); and David Inglis, “Alternative Histories of Cosmopolitanism,” in The Routledge Handbook to Cosmopolitanism, ed. Gerard Delanty (London: Routledge, 2012). 17 Immanuel Kant, “The Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” in Kant’s Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 51. 18 Ctd. in Daniele Archibugi, “Demos and Cosmopolis,” New Left Review 42.13 (January–February 2002), 121. 19 Jürgen Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1998) and Jürgen Habermas, The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001). 20 Robert Fine and William Smith, “Jürgen Habermas’s Theory of Cosmopolitanism,” Constellations 10.4 (2003): 469–87. 21 Kazimir Malevich, “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting [1913],” in Art in Theory 1900–2000, eds. Charles Harrison and Paul J. Wood (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 177. 22 Tomás Saraceno, Flying Plaza: Work Journal 2012–2016 (Leipzig: Spector, 2017), 85. 23 Ibid., 77. 24 Ibid., 135. 25 Mica Nava, Visceral Cosmopolitanism (Oxford: Berg, 2007). 26 Gerardo Mosquera, Art from Latin America and Other Global Pulses (Madrid: Catedra, 2020). 27 Bourriaud, Altermodern. 28 Barbara Creed, Media Matrix: Sexing the New Reality (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2003). 29 Nikos Papastergiadis and Meredith Martin, “Art Biennales and Cities as Platforms for Global Dialogue,” in Festivals and the Cultural Public Sphere, eds. Liana Giorgi, Monica Sassatelli, and Gerard Delanty (London: Routledge, 2011). 30 Timothy Brennan, “Cosmo-Theory,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 100.3 (Summer 2001): 659–91; David Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Susan Buck-Morss, Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left (London: Verso, 2003). 31 Karl Mannheim, Essays in Sociology of Knowledge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952), 32. 32 Ernst Bloch, Experimentum Mundi (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1976). 33 Anna Wessely, “Simmel’s Influence on Lukacs’s Conception of the Sociology of Art,” in Georg Simmel and Contemporary Sociology, eds. Michael Kaern, Bernard S. Phillips, and Robert S. Cohen (Dordrecht: Klauer, 1990), 369. 34 Karl Marx, Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, eds. L. D. Eaton and K. H. Guddat (New York: Doubleday, 1967). 35 Henri Lefebvre, Key Writings (New York: Continuum, 2003), 200. 36 Lilie Chouliaraki, The Ironic Spectator (Cambridge: Polity, 2013).

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37 Terry Smith, What Is Contemporary Art? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 253. 38 Nikos Papastergiadis, Museums of the Commons: L’Internationale and the Crisis of Europe (London: Routledge, 2020). 39 Stephen Vertoc and Robin Cohen, Conceiving Cosmopolitanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 11. 40 Kostas Axelos, “Planetary Interlude,” Yale French Studies 41 (1986): 6–18; Stuart Elden, “Introducing Kostas Axelos and ‘the World,’” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24.5 (2006): 639–42 41 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Creation of the World, or Globalization, trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007). 42 Jean-Luc Nancy, Multiple Arts: The Muses II, ed. Simon Sparks (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 195. 43 Qtd. in Herbert Read, Art and Society (London: Faber & Faber, 1962), iv. 44 Herbert Read, Art Now (London: Faber & Faber, 1960), 34. 45 Thomas Crow, No Idols: The Missing Theology of Art (Sydney: Power Publications, 2017), 13. 46 Donald Preziosi, Rethinking Art History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 117. 47 Walter Benjamin, Reflections, trans. E. Jephcott (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovic, 1978), 178. 48 John Berger, Permanent Red (London: Methuen, 1960), 51. 49 Janet Wolff, The Social Production of Art (New York: New York University Press, 1981), 1. 50 Janet Wolff, Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art (London: Allen & Unwin, 1983), 107–8. 51 John Berger, “Ways of Witnessing,” Marxism Today (October 1984): 37–8. 52 Nikos Papastergiadis, On Art & Friendship (Melbourne: Surpluss, 2020), 38–51. 53 John Berger, The Shape of a Pocket (London: Bloomsbury, 2001), 28–9. 54 Qtd. in Martin Heidegger, “The Anaximander Fragment,” Early Greek Thinking, trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 576. 55 Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design: New Answers to the Ultimate Questions of Life (London: Bantam Books, 2010). 56 Stephen Hawking, Masters of the Universe (London: BBC Publications, 1989). 57 Paul Davies, The Mind of God (London: Penguin, 1993), 20. 58 Ibid., 24. 59 Charles H. Kahn, Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), 211. 60 Rupert Sheldrake, Terence McKenna, and Ralph Abraham, Chaos, Creativity and Cosmic Consciousness (Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 1992), 9. 61 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (London: Random House, 1944). 62 Hawking, Masters of the Universe, 51. 63 Hawking and Mlodinow, The Grand Design, 46.

WORKS CITED Anderson, Perry. Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism. London: Verso, 1974. Archibugi, Daniele. “Demos and Cosmopolis.” New Left Review 42.13 (January–February 2002): 24–38. Axelos, Kostas. “Planetary Interlude.” Yale French Studies 41 (1986): 6–18. Benhabib, Seyla. Another Cosmopolitanism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Benjamin, Walter. Reflections. Trans. E. Jephcott. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovic, 1978. Berger, John. Permanent Red. London: Methuen, 1960. Berger, John. The Shape of a Pocket. London: Bloomsbury, 2001. Berger, John. “Ways of Witnessing.” Marxism Today (October 1984): 37–8. Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. London: Random House, 1944.

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Bloch, Ernst. Experimentum Mundi. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1976. Breckenridge, Carol A., Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, eds. Cosmopolitanism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Brennan, Timothy. “Cosmo-Theory.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 100.3 (Summer 2001): 659–91. Bourriaud, Nicolas. Altermodern. London: Tate Triennial, 2009. Buck-Morss, Susan. Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left. London: Verso, 2003. Calhoun, Craig. Is There Anything Left after Global Spectacles and Local Events? Melbourne: RUPC pamphlets, 2017. Chouliaraki, Lilie. The Ironic Spectator. Cambridge: Polity, 2013. Creed, Barbara. Media Matrix: Sexing the New Reality. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2003. Crow, Thomas. No Idols: The Missing Theology of Art. Sydney: Power Publications, 2017. Davies, Paul. The Mind of God. London: Penguin, 1993. de Duve, Thierry. Look!: 100 Years of Contemporary Art. Brussels: Palais des Beaux-Arts, 2002. Elden, Stuart. “Introducing Kostas Axelos and ‘the World.’” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24.5 (2006): 639–42. Fine, Robert, and William Smith. “Jürgen Habermas’s Theory of Cosmopolitanism.” Constellations 10.4 (2003): 469–87. Gillick, Liam. “Contemporary Art Does Not Account for That Which Is Taking Place.” e-flux (December 2010). https://www.e-flux.com/journal/21/67664/contemporary-art-does-not-accountfor-that-which-is-taking-place/. Goodman, Nelson. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1978. Habermas, Jürgen. The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1998. Habermas, Jürgen. The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001. Harvey, David. Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Hawking, Stephen. Masters of the Universe. London: BBC Publications, 1989. Hawking, Stephen, and Leonard Mlodinow. The Grand Design: New Answers to the Ultimate Questions of Life. London: Bantam Books, 2010. Heidegger, Martin. “The Anaximander Fragment.” Early Greek Thinking. Trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. 13–58. Inglis, David. “Alternative Histories of Cosmopolitanism.” In The Routledge Handbook to Cosmopolitanism. Ed. Gerard Delanty. London: Routledge, 2012. Kahn, Charles H. Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology. New York: Columbia University Press, 1960. Kant, Immanuel. “The Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose.” In Kant: Political Writings. Ed. Hans Reiss. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Kapuscinski, Ryszard. Travels with Herodotus. New York: Vintage, 2008. Kjartanson, Ragnar. “The Visitors.” YouTube, February 8, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=qOxG711lb0E. LeWitt, Sol. Sunrise and Sunset at Praiano. New York: Rizzoli, 1980. Lefebvre, Henri. Key Writings. New York: Continuum, 2003. Malevich, Kazimir. “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting [1913].” In Art in Theory 1900-2000. Eds. Charles Harrison and Paul J. Wood. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. Mannheim, Karl. Essays in Sociology of Knowledge. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952. Marx, Karl. Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society. Eds. L. D. Eaton and K. H. Guddat. New York: Doubleday, 1967. Mosquera, Gerardo. Art from Latin America and Other Global Pulses. Madrid: Catedra, 2020. Mouffe, Chantal. Agonistics. London: Verso, 2013. Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Creation of the World, or Globalization. Trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Multiple Arts: The Muses II. Ed. Simon Sparks. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. Nava, Mica. Visceral Cosmopolitanism. Oxford: Berg, 2007.

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Papastergiadis, Nikos. Cosmopolitanism and Culture. Polity Press: Cambridge, 2012. Papastergiadis, Nikos. Museums of the Commons: L’Internationale and the Crisis of Europe. London: Routledge, 2020. Papastergiadis, Nikos. On Art & Friendship. Melbourne: Surpluss, 2020. Papastergiadis, Nikos, and Meredith Martin. “Art Biennales and Cities as Platforms for Global Dialogue.” In Festivals and the Cultural Public Sphere. Eds. Liana Giorgi, Monica Sassatelli, and Gerard Delanty. London: Routledge, 2011. Pieterse, Jan Nederveen. “Emancipatory Cosmopolitanism: Towards an Agenda.” Development and Change 37.6 (2006): 1247–57. Preziosi, Donald. Rethinking Art History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. Read, Herbert. Art and Society. London: Faber & Faber, 1962. Read, Herbert. Art Now. London: Faber & Faber, 1960. Saraceno, Tomás. Flying Plaza: Work Journal 2012-2016. Leipzig: Spector, 2017. Seed, Patricia. The Oxford Map Companion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Sheldrake, Rupert, Terence McKenna, and Ralph Abraham. Chaos, Creativity and Cosmic Consciousness. Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 1992. Sloterdijk, Peter. In the World Interior of Capital. Trans. Wieland Hoban. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013. Smith, Terry. Contemporary Arts: World Currents. London: Laurence King Publishing, 2011. Smith, Terry. What Is Contemporary Art? Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Stengers, Isabelle. Cosmopolitics II. Trans. Robert Bononno. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2011. Sugimoto, Hiroshi. Seascapes. Bologna: Damiani, 2018. Vertovec, Steven, and Robin Cohen. Conceiving Cosmopolitanism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Wessely, Anna. “Simmel’s Influence on Lukacs’s Conception of the Sociology of Art.” In Georg Simmel and Contemporary Sociology. Eds. Michael Kaern, Bernard S. Phillips, and Robert S. Cohen. Dordrecht: Klauer, 1990. Wolff, Janet. Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art. London: Allen & Unwin, 1983. Wolff, Janet. The Social Production of Art. New York: New York University Press, 1981. Zijlmans, Kitty, and Wilfried van Damme, eds. World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches. Amsterdam: Valiz, 2008.

CHAPTER FIVE

Worlding Postmodernism HANS BERTENS

Although they had been used before in various contexts, in their current sense the terms “postmodern” and “postmodernism” date from the 1960s. Initially, they referred to new departures in the arts, in literature, and in architecture that had their origins in the 1950s and early 1960s, had gained momentum in the course of the 1960s, and would become a dominant factor in the 1970s. Although the innovations associated with postmodernism remained recognizable enough, in the 1980s and after, they were gradually absorbed by the mainstream and lost their original force. Postmodern art and literature were informed by a sensibility that questioned rather than affirmed and that was irreverent and ironic, effortlessly shuttling between the serious and the playful. It rejected the distinction between high art and popular culture and demystified the iconic status of art and the artist. In the course of the 1960s, its questioning spirit entered American literary criticism, where the label “postmodern” first gained wide currency, and where in the next decade such views were connected with the writings of a number of French thinkers, notably Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. Their work, loosely grouped together and labeled poststructuralism, seemed to provide a better set of tools for dealing with postmodern literature than traditional criticism could offer. To the fast-increasing number of critics who adopted these tools, poststructuralism and the various postmodern practices seemed to have a good deal in common. As a result, poststructuralist ideas were increasingly applied to postmodern literature and art in a practice that soon came to be seen as postmodern criticism. This postmodern criticism—later called “postmodern theory” or simply “theory”— adopted from poststructuralism its central interest in problems of language and signification. It saw meaning as inherently unstable and uncontrollable, a view that rules out traditional forms of representation and that seriously questions notions of originality and authorship, and it rejected the liberal humanist notion of the self-determined and coherent subject and preferred to speak of subject positions, seeing individual subjectivity as the unsteady product of (often conflicting) discourses. On a higher level of aggregation, postmodern criticism or theory distrusted conceptual systems and saw Enlightenment universalism and essentialism as ultimately totalitarian. In a later stage, it developed an interest in how language was instrumental in establishing and perpetuating power relations and in processes of marginalization. Other humanities disciplines—art history, musicology, religious studies— followed the lead of literary studies, and postmodern criticism or theory even became a force outside the humanities. In the early 1980s, in a final and somewhat breathtaking move, the term “postmodern” was applied to late-twentieth-century Western society as a whole, with the influential Marxist critic Fredric Jameson arguing that postmodernism constituted the cultural logic of a new phase of capitalism in which the modernist critique of capitalism had

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made place for postmodern complicity. This chapter limits itself to postmodernism in literary studies, not only because literary postmodernism is the “original” postmodernism, but also because literary studies was the origin of postmodern theory, which has easily been the most influential of all things that we call postmodernism.

THE RAPID RISE OF THE POSTMODERN There are good reasons for seeing the postmodernism of literary studies as thoroughly “worlded.” It has generated, and continues to generate, overwhelming interest. Even though its heyday is clearly over, the discussion of the subject is far from closed, as a glance at the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America—which focuses on literary studies—confirms. At the time of writing, the Bibliography lists 8,798 publications under “postmodernism” and 7,072 under “postmodern,” a still impressive 1,029 of which appeared in the last five years. By way of comparison, “modernism,” a term with a much longer pedigree and which covers what are arguably the most impressive literary achievements of the twentieth century, has a count of 15,361 (a further comparison of “postmodern” with “modern” is not really possible because the Bibliography muddles the waters by also listing publications on early modern literature under the heading “modern”). No doubt, there will be a good deal of overlap between the publications listed under “postmodernism” and those listed under “postmodern,” but obviously postmodernism has had, and still has, its share of scholarly and critical attention. Another reason to think of literary postmodernism as “worlded” is its transnational character. This is not to say that it manifests itself in exactly the same way wherever we find it. David Damrosch has suggested that we should see a world literature text as “an elliptical reflection of national literatures, with the source and host cultures providing the two foci that generate the elliptical space within which a work lives as world literature, connected to both cultures, circumscribed by neither alone.”1 It may be argued that in the case of postmodern literature, such a space should have three foci: the transnational mode of writing that we call postmodern, the postmodern text in question, and the national literature to which that text belongs. Some of postmodernism’s national inflections are more distinct than others, but for all their differences, they clearly belong to the same international family. Postmodern literature was an international affair almost right from the start. Although it is generally seen as originating chiefly in the United States, it had an international pedigree that included writers such as the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges and the Irish Frenchman Samuel Beckett and—for the first postmodern American poets—the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, and it almost immediately appealed to writers in Europe and elsewhere. These writers did not need a thorough command of the English language in order to read their American colleagues. Thomas Pynchon’s V. of 1963, one of the very first postmodern novels, appeared in German in 1968, and in the course of the 1970s American postmodernists like John Barth, Robert Coover, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme, Richard Brautigan, and William Gass, among others, were translated into a good many languages. Rather amazingly, given its view of Western cultural decadence but illustrative of American postmodernism’s impact, in the 1980s, even the communist leadership of the Sovietdominated German Democratic Republic allowed its official publishing house, Volk und Welt (People and World), to publish translations of Barthelme, Pynchon, Brautigan, Vonnegut, and Susan Sontag. True to form, every translation came with an afterword that emphasized the bourgeois decadence of these texts.

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What even better illustrates the truly international character of postmodern fiction is the number of translations of postmodern texts, from a large variety of languages, into English. It tells us, first of all, that practically all over the world writers had been drawn to what in the course of the 1960s and 1970s had established itself as a new mode of writing. But it also tells us that American and English publishers felt there was an audience for this particular fiction. From the mid-1960s onwards, English translations began to appear of novels by Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor, Marguerite Duras, and Georges Perec (France), Carlos Fuentes (Mexico), Julio Cortázar and Manuel Puig (Argentina), Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia), Guillermo Cabrera Infante (Cuba), Julian Goytisolo (Spain), Peter Handke, Thomas Bernhard, and Christoph Ransmayr (Austria), Cees Nooteboom and Harry Mulisch (the Netherlands), Günther Grass, Ulrich Plenzdorf, and Peter Chotjewitz (Germany), Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco (Italy), Peter Esterházy (Hungary), Milan Kundera (Czechoslovakia), Vasily Aksyonov, Viktor Yerofeyev, and Andrej Bitov (USSR), Milorad Pavić and Danilo Kĭs (Yugoslavia), and by other writers who at the time were thought to be postmodern. Somewhat later, these translations from European languages were joined by translations from other languages. Postmodern fiction from China (Yu Hua, Mo Yan, Han Shaogong, Hai Nan) found its way to a Western reading public and so did Japanese postmodern fiction, represented first of all by Haruki Murakami, but also by Genichirō Takahashi and Masahiko Shimada. Like postmodernism itself, the academic response to postmodern literature, in the form of a critical discussion of postmodern texts, also had its origins in the United States, and that discussion, too, soon became an international matter, not in the least because American critics actively promoted the new literature wherever they were invited to do so. In 1968, the prominent critic Leslie Fiedler presented his exuberant, pop-oriented version of literary postmodernism at the University of Freiburg in Germany. His lecture was published in the Christian weekly Christ und Welt (Christ and World), with ten writers and critics offering a response, leading to a fiery and widely followed intellectual controversy. Soon after, Fiedler, Barth, and other prominent participants in the expanding debate on postmodernism took part in an international conference in the Netherlands, with again a wave of publicity following their performances. In the course of the 1970s, Ihab Hassan, a tireless promoter of postmodern writing, became a frequent guest at European conferences. Toward the end of that decade, on the other side of the still firmly anchored Iron Curtain, literary academics working in American Studies programs persuaded the authorities to invite American postmodern critics and writers and were instrumental in creating a more general intellectual interest in postmodernism. In 1982, the Slovenian literary magazine Sodobnost initiated a discussion of postmodern literature. The next year, the Institute of Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy organized a German-Hungarian symposium that was mainly devoted to postmodern literature, and in 1985, a Polish conference featured Sontag and John Ashbery as its keynote speakers. Perhaps even more noticeable was the “Postmodern and Us” conference that the Moscow Institute of Literature organized in 1990. Postmodern criticism’s internationalization was by no means limited to Europe. In China, Barth’s landmark essay “The Literature of Replenishment” of 1980 was immediately translated and published in the Shanghai journal Waiguo wenxue baodao (“Foreign Literature”), and in 1985 Jameson, who took a Marxist and dim view of postmodernism, was invited to offer a series of lectures at Peking University (published in Chinese in 1987). Around the same time, Japanese critics began to publish studies of postmodernism while Jean-François Lyotard’s theorization of postmodernism in La condition postmoderne of 1979 appeared in Japanese in 1986, only two years after it had been published in English.

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INAUSPICIOUS BEGINNINGS The academic response to postmodern literature is important for two reasons. One is that after its 1980s mutation into postmodern theory that I have sketched in the introduction, theory began to lead a life of its own and even eclipsed the postmodern literature from which it had broken away. The other reason is that it is postmodern criticism, to give it a more practical name, that created postmodernism. As Philip Stevick noted as early as 1973, in the case of postmodern writing, “what we have is not a movement, not a clique, not a group, not a school, not a unified assertion of anything nor a reaction against anything … As for the manifestos, the polemical introductions, the defensive stance-taking so commonplace in the past, they are all virtually non-existent.”2 Far more than earlier literary movements, postmodernism is the product of academic criticism and particularly of academic theorizing. In fact, without the mutation of postmodern criticism into postmodern theory, we might never have had postmodernism, that is, we would of course have had the literature, but not the term. Let us look in some detail at the way “postmodern literature” as a critical concept developed, because that genesis tells us interesting things about its character. As I have already noted, postmodern criticism had its origins in the United States, and it might easily have stayed a rather minor player on the American academic scene, focused exclusively on the discussion of a limited corpus of postmodern texts. It was initially not even clear that the terms “postmodern” and “postmodernism” were all that viable, not in the least because they were at best confusing, if not misleading. In its earliest phase, postmodern literature was seen as an articulation of Heideggerian existentialism. When, in the early 1950s, the American poet and critic Charles Olson began to use the term “postmodern” to describe his own poetry and that of some like-minded colleagues, he did not so much imply a break with the poetry of Modernism but rather with a Western tradition led astray by the rationalistic heritage of classical philosophy. For Olson, that rationalism stood between us and authentic experience, as his preference for “language as the act of the instant” over “language as the act of thought about the instant” makes clear.3 Olson’s postmodernism is premodern, or, to adopt his terminology, pre-West, rather than postmodern. We find similar views in Charles Altieri, who saw the “decreation” that is “a basic process for the postmodern arts”4 as enabling “[i]nfinite modes of authenticity,”5 and in William Spanos, one of literary postmodernism’s most prominent early champions, who argued that “it was the recognition of the ultimately ‘totalitarian’ implications of the Western structure of consciousness … that compelled the postmodern imagination to undertake the deliberate and systematic subversion of plot—the beginning, middle, and end structure—which has enjoyed virtually unchallenged supremacy of the Western literary imagination ever since Aristotle.”6 Spanos, who, besides Heidegger, also drew on Derrida, found postmodernism’s “strategy of de-composition”7 in a long line of texts that went against the Western grain, starting with Euripides. This existentialist postmodernism is worth recalling because it already presented the radical questioning of the West’s intellectual heritage that would come to characterize postmodern theory, with the major difference that for its advocates, postmodern literature sought to achieve authenticity, a concept that the postmodern theory of the 1980s would emphatically reject. Critics of early postmodern fiction did not follow this existentialist lead and, focusing on its exuberance, its irreverence, and on the liberties it allowed itself with realistic narration, came to entirely different conclusions. Leslie Fiedler saw a whole countercultural generation of young “post-modernists”8 whose world was also “post-humanist, post-male, post-white, postheroic.”9 Other critics, limiting themselves to the new fiction—none of them used the term

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“postmodern”—spoke of postmodern writers as “fabulators,”10 of a “literature of parody that makes fun of itself as it goes along,”11 of the “post-realist novel,”12 and of the “problematic novel,” a new type of novel that did not wholly abandon “the reality principle” but made the reader “participate in the aesthetic and philosophical problems the writing of fiction presents”13—a type of novel that William Gass would later call “metafiction.” Philip Stevick, too, noted that the new fiction “permit[ted] itself a degree of latitude from the illusionist tradition greater than in any body of fiction since the beginning of the novel,”14 and he also felt that it represented “the act of writing as an act of play.”15 What gradually emerged was a sense that the liberties that the new fiction permitted itself were not simply expressions of rebelliousness or of irrepressible exuberance but had a more profound character. When the English critic David Lodge revisited postmodern fiction in 1977, he made a compelling case for its seriousness: “The difficulty, for the reader, of postmodernist writing is not so much a matter of obscurity (which might be cleared up) as of uncertainty, which is endemic, and manifests itself on the level of narrative rather than style.”16 Likewise, for his American colleague Alan Wilde, what the latter chose to call “midfiction” was characterized by its “tolerance … of a fundamental uncertainty about the meanings and relations of things in the world and in the universe.”17 For these critics, postmodern writing faces up to its representational shortcomings and sees them as inevitable: given the chaotic and inscrutable nature of reality, representation can at best be only partially successful. It should be emphasized that this failure of representation is not a failure of language, as it will be for those later critics who examine postmodernism through a poststructuralist lens—we see an example of that totally different sort of representational failure in Linda Hutcheon’s theorizing of “historiographic metafiction,”18 which in terms of narrative technique is not any different from Wilde’s “midfiction” or Lodge’s “problematic novel.” For Wilde and Lodge, it is reality itself, rather than the language we use to represent it, that stands in the way of representation. I will come back to this view of postmodern writing, which to my mind has a better claim to be considered the “worlded” form of postmodern literature than the postmodern writing that not much later would be promoted by postmodern theory. Finally, still in the 1970s, Hassan linked postmodernism with the European avant-gardes of the interbellum, leading his (European) colleague Matei Calinescu to point out that “many of the postmodernist notes defined by Hassan can easily be traced back to Dada and, not infrequently, to Surrealism.”19 Not surprisingly, Calinescu preferred “new avant-garde” or “contemporary avant-garde” to the term “postmodernism.” In a similar vein, Christine BrookeRose claimed that “American ‘postmodernism’ often seems a late and diluted imitation” of the “basic philosophy of surrealism.”20 And Andreas Huyssen, too, noted “the similarity and continuity between American postmodernism and certain segments of an earlier European avant-garde,”21 even though US postmodernism had abandoned the avant-garde ideals of social change and the transformation of everyday life.

FROM POSTMODERN CRITICISM TO POSTMODERN THEORY To summarize, until the early 1980s, postmodern literature was seen as an attempt to regain the authenticity we had lost with the advent of Western rationality, as a liberation from a stifling and repressive Western culture, as an admission—and an exploration—of the impossibilities of representation, or as an admittedly inventive and entertaining but politically toothless revival of the European avant-gardes, if not as a combination of two or more of these alternatives. As things stood, postmodernism might well have stayed a niche term,

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applied to a limited corpus of literary texts—if it would have taken root at all, given the resistance to the term of even many critics who actively welcomed the new literature. What changed things and made postmodernism practically a household name was the combination of two revolutions. The first one had been some years in the making, while the second one came as a bombshell. When, in 1982, Hassan remarked that “the postmodernist attitude merges also with the poststructuralist stance,”22 he called attention to what was turning into a fundamental change of direction in the critical discussion of postmodern literature. Let me quote just two of the many critics who either were involved in this mutation from postmodern criticism to postmodern theory or watched it from the sideline. In 1980, Craig Owens argued that “a deconstructive impulse is characteristic of postmodernist art in general” and that postmodernism “works … to problematize the activity of reference,”23 while for Huyssen, writing in 1981, it was clear that “there are definite links between the ethos of postmodernism and the American appropriation of poststructuralism, especially Derrida.”24 In the course of the 1980s, postmodernism and poststructuralism would indeed for all practical purposes merge under the banner of postmodernism. We see the signs everywhere. In 1984, Allen Thiher (still unhappy with the term “postmodern”)25 draws heavily on Derrida (and the latter’s source of inspiration, Saussure) in his Words in Reflection: Modern Language Theory and Postmodern Fiction. The next year, in the introduction to a collection of essays entitled The Postmodern Turn, Stanley Trachtenberg tells us that “the shift from traditional narration” in contemporary fiction is due to the fact that “the meaning of language can no longer be controlled.”26 Fastforwarding in time, we see that Derrida and, to a lesser degree, other poststructuralist writers are all over the place in for, instance, Hutcheon’s A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (1988), Steven Connor’s Postmodernist Culture (1989), Brenda K. Marshall’s Teaching the Postmodern: Fiction and Theory (1992), Andrew Gibson’s Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative (1996), Niall Lucy’s Postmodern Literary Theory (1997), and Mark Currie’s Postmodern Narrative Theory (1998). We notice the same development in books that focus on what had come to be called postmodern theory. In 1991, John McGowan could declare that “Derrida’s work has been so crucially important to postmodernism,”27 and in the same year, Steven Best and Douglas Kellner’s Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations discussed the work of Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Jean Baudrillard, and Lyotard, with Derrida making frequent appearances.28 Literary critics began to refer routinely to “postmodern thought” in their discussions of Barthes, Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Lyotard, Baudrillard, and other less prominent writers. “Postmodernism” or “postmodern theory” (as in Best and Kellner’s title) now simply referred to an amalgam of poststructuralist ideas and assumptions. As a consequence of this identification of postmodernism with poststructuralism, postmodern fiction was now completely drawn into the poststructuralist orbit and was seen as the creative counterpart of poststructuralist theory.29 Critics analyzing postmodern texts now found différance, aporias, realities that were ideological constructions, identities that were the product of discourses—in fact, the full range of poststructuralist themes. With reality unmasked as construction, authenticity had become a mirage. But even that construction could not be represented. Given the premise that language is inherently subject to the play of difference and to an infinite deferral of meaning, no text would ever be able to arrive at a truthful representation. Arguably, from this perspective, all texts, whatever the intentions of their authors, have always been postmodern, that is, subject to the play of difference and the elusiveness of final meaning. What then distinguishes texts from each other is their degree of blindness to that condition, with “postmodern” writing the most aware of its own inadequacy. This poststructuralist mode of reading postmodern texts

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put a radical interpretation on every single feature that critics such as Stevick and Lodge had identified as “new” and turned all postmodern texts into poststructuralist exhibits.

GROWING DISENCHANTMENT Just like the notion of postmodernism itself, postmodern theory traveled fast and found an enthusiastic international audience. For the advocates of postmodern theory, the problematization of “the activity of reference” that Owens and many other critics ascribed to postmodernism was a political, emancipatory act. Derrida’s destabilization of language, Foucault’s unmasking of what seemed to be coherent knowledge systems as mere discourses, and Lyotard’s exposure of the “metanarratives” that underpinned contemporary Western culture as unfounded and self-serving stories all worked together to create a sense that oppression—patriarchal, racist, and in other forms—could now be tackled with irrefutable arguments. Owens’s 1983 “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism” offers a good example. Arguing that “the tyranny of the signifier, the violence of its law”30 were responsible for the fact that the representational systems of the West “posit the subject of representation as absolutely centered, unitary, masculine,”31 Owens saw an “apparent crossing of the feminist critique of patriarchy and the postmodernist critique of representation.”32 Going further, he even suggested that “women’s insistence on difference and incommensurability may not only be compatible with, but also an instance of postmodern thought.”33 To some feminists, this seemed reasonable enough—in 1987 Jane Flax spoke of feminist theory as a “type of postmodern philosophy”34—and postmodern theory and feminism certainly shared a number of intellectual sources. But postmodern theory’s frontal attack on representation and Enlightenment thought soon drew sharp criticism. As Sabina Lovibond asked, “How can anyone ask me to say goodbye to ‘emancipatory metanarratives’ when my own emancipation is still such a patchy, hit-and-miss affair?”35 Postmodern theory’s rejection of essentialism was welcomed because it undermined the claims of patriarchy, but it soon became clear that an unqualified embrace of postmodern thought might easily backfire. Postmodern theory provided perfect ammunition for deconstructing all sorts of repressive, essentialist positions, but it offered very little in the way of reconstruction, of foundations on which to build alternatives. We see a similar disenchantment in the emerging postcolonial theory that was obviously indebted to postmodernism but soon would go its own way. A couple of examples will have to suffice. Discussing postmodernism and postcolonialism, Simon During remarked in 1987 that “[t]he post-colonial desire is the desire of decolonized communities for an identity.”36 But for postmodern theory, such an identity could never be more than a provisional narrative, a construction that could only achieve stability through exclusion and repression. Writing on “[t]he postcolonial and the postmodern,” Homi Bhabha argued a few years later that postcolonial critics must “rename,” as he put it, “the postmodern from the position of the postcolonial.”37 Postmodernism, in its 1980s incarnation as a synthesis of poststructuralist arguments and positions, no longer was the cutting edge of literary studies. While the various poststructuralist arguments kept playing important roles in the new critical and theoretical departures of the new millennium, the concept under whose umbrella they had been brought together gradually lost its former luster. For a large number of critics, that luster had already been badly tarnished in 1983 and 1984, with the publication of two enormously influential articles by Jameson, who did not so much identify postmodernism with poststructuralism but went one step further in seeing

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poststructuralism as one of the manifestations of a much wider defined postmodernism. The impact of Jameson’s Marxist approach is hard to overestimate. As Khachig Tölölyan observed in a 1990 article that reviewed a number of recent books on postmodernism, “However heterogeneous the other concerns invoked during the debates that structure these books, the Marxist … and poststructuralist … version of postmodernism remain formative.”38 For Jameson, postmodernism was a periodizing concept so that his postmodernism is virtually omnipresent. It is the “cultural dominant” of the contemporary period because it is the “cultural logic” of capitalism: “[P]ostmodernism expresses the inner truth of that newly emergent social order of late capitalism.”39 Under the regime of late capitalism, culture has become completely commodified while it has simultaneously expanded “throughout the social realm,”40 an unprecedented condition which for Jameson spells the end of political critique. Postmodern literature suffers from “a new depthlessness” and a cavalier disregard for “truth,” the same failures Jameson also finds in poststructuralist theory: “[T]he very concept of ‘truth’ itself is part of the metaphysical baggage which poststructuralism seeks to abandon.”41 This does not exhaust Jameson’s list of postmodernism’s sins, which also include “the fragmentation of the subject,”42 but the central issue is that postmodern literature has given up on representation, which for Jameson is a prerequisite for political critique, while for postmodern theory representation takes us on the road to totalitarianism—witness Owens’s “tyranny of the signifier” or Lyotard’s appeal to “wage war on totality” through a disruptive postmodernism that seeks the “unpresentable” rather than that which can be represented.43 Jameson’s attack on both postmodern literature and postmodern theory and the wave of critical endorsement that followed sent postmodernism’s stock plummeting. Postmodern theory’s intellectual standing never recovered from this crash, and loss of prestige, combined with the gradual disenchantment of feminist and postcolonial critics with what postmodern theory had to offer, would in the course of the 1990s lead to a much diminished role, in particular on the international level—a process accelerated after a number of well-known scientists and intellectuals had weighed in and characterized postmodern theory as fact-free and anti-rational. Postmodern theory appeared less and less compelling, certainly outside the United States. It now seemed the intellectual preoccupation of a small number of no doubt well-intentioned Western academics, who, in spite of their rejection of essentialism, imagined that their insights had universal validity or had at least the irrefutability of other intellectual constructs such as advanced mathematics. Postmodern theory certainly was an international enterprise with its European sources, its American bricolage of poststructuralist themes and arguments, and its international dissemination. But how “worlded” is a mode of theorizing that for all practical purposes never left the humanities departments on university campuses? If it was ever “worlded,” it was a condition that did not last.

BACK TO BASICS Let me turn now to postmodernism’s creative branch, postmodern literature. Does Jameson’s claim that postmodern literature abandoned representation hold water? His claim would seem to find confirmation in one of Gass’s provocative statements: “What you want to do is to create a work that can be read non-referentially.”44 But that does, of course, leave open the possibility that such a work can also be read referentially and be seen as representational. In fact, having it both ways is exactly what the large majority of postmodernist authors is after. It explains their generally disruptive tactics, such as their deliberate mixing of

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stylistic registers or of ontological levels (with, for instance, authors entering their own fiction). Postmodernist writers consciously create contradictions. In one and the same text, they present us with two conflicting modes of representation that we cannot reconcile with each other, with each mode questioning (and undermining) the other. One of these modes of representation will represent what is familiar. It may be a fictional story that we know quite well—say, that of Robinson Crusoe, as in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe—or it may be what we regard as the real world, or it may be a well-known historical figure or event. The other representation will take great liberties with the first: the story that we know so well will be drastically rewritten, or history will be turned upside down, or we will be bewildered by an alternative reality that is at odds with the reality we know. One mode of representation will suggest depth and meaning and invite traditional interpretation, while the other will deny depth and meaning and actively obstruct any coherent interpretation. It is a process that creates pertinent questions and may, depending on the reader, also create pertinent insights. The postmodern writer John Barth once called his parodic novels The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) and Giles Goat-Boy (1966) “novels which imitate the form of the Novel, by an author who imitates the role of the Author,”45 and his use of the lower case is a felicitous illustration of the way postmodernist authors think about their profession. Postmodernist literature does not claim the sort of authority with which literature and authors have been invested ever since Romanticism. This is not false modesty. As Barth has also said, “no one has claim to originality in literature; all writers are more or less faithful amanuenses of the spirit, translators and annotators of preexisting archetypes.”46 Barth and his fellow postmodernists are fully aware that all representations of reality are shot through with unconscious borrowings and involuntary echoes. They are equally aware of the limitations of the supposedly timeless, universal truths that once were central to representations of reality. They know and accept that their truths are personal and situational, no matter how strongly they hold them. Paradoxically, the loss of faith in representational practices leads to unexpected freedom. It releases the author from the obligation to stay as close as possible to reality or, for that matter, history. And so authors feel free to enter the fictional worlds they create, to lift characters, both fictional and historical, from their original environment and to reuse them in new settings, to reimagine history, or to expand the possibilities of our own world with rather startling innovations. As Barth once said, “such a simple premise as the comic mode, or the parodic, or a fantastical mode, rather than a realistic mode, already, it seems to me, unties you, sets you free.”47 But this freedom does not imply a refusal of moral responsibility—witness Robert Coover’s The Public Burning (1977), Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984), Nicola Barker’s Darkmans (2007), and countless other postmodern texts. Postmodernist literature’s narrative energy and the obvious delight that it takes in its own inventiveness do not stand in the way of an interrogation of the moral and political status quo. This postmodernism was and is resolutely international. It is both fully “worlded” and, in spite of appearances, rooted in the world.

NOTES 1 David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 283. 2 Philip Stevick, “Scheherazade Runs Out of Plots, Goes on Talking; the King, Perplexed, Listens: An Essay on the New Fiction,” TriQuarterly 26 (1973): 335–6. 3 Charles Olson, Human Universe and Other Essays, ed. Donald Allen (New York: Grove Press, 1967): 4; original publication is 1951.

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4 Charles Altieri, “From Symbolist Thought to Immanence: The Ground of American Poetics,” boundary 2 1.3 (1973): 612. 5 Ibid., 613. 6 William Spanos, “The Detective and the Boundary: Some Notes on the Postmodern Literary Imagination,” boundary 2 1.1 (1972): 155. 7 Ibid., 155. 8 Leslie Fiedler, “The New Mutants,” Partisan Review 32 (1965): 515. 9 Ibid., 517. 10 Robert Scholes, The Fabulators (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967). 11 Richard Poirier, “The Politics of Self-Parody,” Partisan Review 35.3 (1968): 339. 12 Ronald Sukenick, The Death of the Novel and Other Stories (New York: The Dial Press, 1969), 47. 13 David Lodge, “The Novelist at the Crossroads,” Critical Quarterly 11 (1969): 123. 14 Stevick, “Scheherazade Runs Out of Plots,” 360. 15 Ibid., 361. 16 Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing (London: Arnold, 1977), 226. 17 Alan Wilde, “Irony in the Postmodern Age: Toward a Map of Suspensiveness,” boundary 2 9.1 (1980): 9. 18 Linda Hutcheon, The Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988). 19 Matei Calinescu, “Avant-Garde, Neo-Avant-Garde, Postmodernism: The Culture of Crisis,” Clio 4.3 (1975): 332. 20 Christine Brooke-Rose, A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure, Especially of the Fantastic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 387. 21 Andreas Huyssen, “The Search for Tradition: Avant-Garde and Postmodernism in the 1970s,” New German Critique 35 (1981): 31. 22 Ihab Hassan, The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature, 2nd edition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), xiii. 23 Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism. Part 2,” October 13 (1980): 79–80. 24 Huyssen, “The Search for Tradition,” 34. 25 Allen Thiher, Words in Reflection: Modern Language Theory and Postmodern Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 7. 26 Stanley Trachtenberg, The Postmodern Moment: A Handbook of Contemporary Innovation in the Arts (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 14. 27 John McGowan, Postmodernism and Its Critics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1991), 119. 28 Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations (New York: Guilford, 1991). 29 See, for instance, Allen Thiher’s “A Theory of Literature or Recent Literature as Theory,” 1988. 30 Craig Owens, “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays in Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983), 59. 31 Ibid., 58. 32 Ibid., 59. 33 Ibid., 61–62. 34 Jane Flax, “Postmodernism and Gender Relations in Feminist Theory,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 12.4 (1987): 624. 35 Sabina Lovibond, “Feminism and Postmodernism,” in Postmodernism and Society, eds. Roy Boyne and Ali Rattansi (London: Macmillan, 1990), 161. 36 Simon During, “Postmodernism or Post-colonialism Today,” in Thomas Docherty, ed., Postmodernism: A Reader (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), 458. 37 Homi Babha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 175.

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38 Khachig Tölölyan, “The Second Time as Farce: Postmodernism without Consequences,” American Literary History 2.4 (1990): 759. 39 Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays in Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983), 113. 40 Jameson, “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (1984): 87. 41 Ibid., 61. 42 Ibid., 65. 43 Jean-François Lyotard, “Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?” in Innovation/ Renovation: New Perspectives on the Humanities, eds. Ihab Hassan and Sally Hassan (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 340–41. 44 Tom LeClair and Larry McCaffery, eds., Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 164. 45 John Barth, The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction (New York: Putnam, 1984), 79. 46 Ibid., 80. 47 Joe David Bellamy, ed., The New Fiction: Interviews with Innovative American Writers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974), 16.

WORKS CITED Altieri, Charles. “From Symbolist Thought to Immanence: The Ground of American Poetics.” boundary 2 1.3 (1973): 605–42. Barth, John. The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction. New York: Putnam, 1984. Bellamy, Joe David, ed. The New Fiction: Interviews with Innovative American Writers. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974. Best, Steven, and Douglas Kellner. Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations. New York: Guilford, 1991. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Brooke-Rose, Christine. A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure, Especially of the Fantastic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Calinescu, Matei. “Avant-Garde, Neo-Avant-Garde, Postmodernism: The Culture of Crisis.” Clio 4.3 (1975): 317–40. Connor, Steven. Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. Currie, Mark. Postmodern Narrative Theory, London: Macmillan, 1998. Damrosch, David. What is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. During, Simon. “Postmodernism or Post-colonialism Today.” In Postmodernism: A Reader. Ed. Thomas Docherty. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993. 448–62. Federman, Raymond. “Surfiction: A Position.” Partisan Review 40.3 (1973): 427–32. Fiedler, Leslie. “The New Mutants.” Partisan Review 32 (1965): 505–25. Flax, Jane. “Postmodernism and Gender Relations in Feminist Theory.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 12.4 (1987): 621–43. Guerard, Albert. “Notes on the Rhetoric of Anti-Realist Fiction.” TriQuarterly 30 (1974): 3–50. Hassan, Ihab. The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature. Second Edition. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982. Hutcheon, Linda. The Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988. Huyssen, Andreas. “The Search for Tradition: Avant-Garde and Postmodernism in the 1970s.” New German Critique 35 (1981): 5–52. Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” In The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays in Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983. 111–25. Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” New Left Review 146 (1984): 53–92.

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LeClair, Tom, and Larry McCaffery, eds. Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983. Lodge, David. The Modes of Modern Writing. London: Arnold, 1977. Lodge, David. “The Novelist at the Crossroads.” Critical Quarterly 11 (1969): 105–32. Lovibond, Sabina. “Feminism and Postmodernism.” In Postmodernism and Society. Eds.Roy Boyne and Ali Rattansi. London: Macmillan, 1990. 154–86. Lucy, Niall. Postmodern Literary Theory: An Introduction. London: Blackwell, 1997. Lyotard, Jean-François. “Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?” In Innovation/ Renovation: New Perspectives on the Humanities. Eds. Ihab Hassan and Sally Hassan. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983. 329–41. Marshall, Brenda K. Teaching the Postmodern: Fiction and Theory. New York: Routledge, 1992. McGowan, John. Postmodernism and Its Critics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. Olson, Charles. Human Universe and Other Essays. Ed. Donald Allen. New York: Grove Press, 1967. Owens, Craig. “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism. Part 2.” October 13 (1980): 59–80. Owens, Craig. “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism.” In The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays in Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983. Poirier, Richard. “The Politics of Self-Parody.” Partisan Review 35.3 (1968): 339–53. Scholes, Robert. The Fabulators. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. Spanos, William. “The Detective and the Boundary: Some Notes on the Postmodern Literary Imagination.” boundary 2 1.1 (1972): 147–68. Stevick, Philip. “Scheherazade Runs Out of Plots, Goes on Talking; the King, Puzzled, Listens: An Essay on the New Fiction.” TriQuarterly 26 (1973): 332–62. Sukenick, Ronald. The Death of the Novel and Other Stories. New York: The Dial Press, 1969. Thiher, Allen. “A Theory of Literature or Recent Literature as Theory.” Contemporary Literature 29.3 (1988): 337–50. Thiher, Allen. Words in Reflection: Modern Language Theory and Postmodern Fiction, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Tölölyan, Khachig. “The Second Time as Farce: Postmodernism without Consequences.” American Literary History 2.4 (1990): 756–71. Trachtenberg, Stanley, ed. The Postmodern Moment: A Handbook of Contemporary Innovation in the Arts. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985. Wilde, Alan. “Irony in the Postmodern Age: Toward a Map of Suspensiveness.” boundary 2 9.1 (1980): 5–46.

CHAPTER SIX

Worlding Comparative Literature CHRISTIAN MORARU

[O]ur philological home is the earth[.] —Erich Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur,” 1952 [N]ot just American house, but the world house. —Representative John Lewis, CBS This Morning, June 3, 2020 Literature helps worlding the world[.] —Bertrand Westphal, Metacritic, June 2020 As in the Handbook’s other chapter titles, the gerund in mine indexes a disciplinary project as well as an ongoing process. Both are fairly recent. They are, in fact, epistemological marks of the contemporary. The discipline they have been affecting is, in this case, comparative literature; worlding, the process I am referring to, and on which this volume’s contributions variously expound, has been steadily overhauling this particular corner of the humanities, as it has others, since the early 1990s. What is more, not only did the worlding of comparative literature get underway after the fall of the Berlin Wall—itself the worlding event of the last decades—but this latest metamorphosis of comparatism is highly characteristic of the post-Cold War era, especially of the new millennium. Part and parcel of changes reaching far beyond the ivory towers, the transformation is as geopolitically intelligible as other phenomena, less academic yet isomorphic with this shift and so largely attuned to the logic of accelerating world-scale transnationalism, from capital mobility, neoliberal consolidation of world markets, outsourcing, migration, weakening of national sovereignty, growing ecumenic awareness, and cosmopolitan lifestyles, to internet data exchange, the social media, simultaneous publishing, the pandemic du jour, and other aspects of late globalization’s mixed-bag symptomatology. What has been happening to comparative literature in this unprecedented environment is not exactly tantamount to a superseding of the field by World Literature. The latter shares and should be expected to further hone at least some of the former’s tools, skills, and concerns, including multilingual expertise and ability to work in the original idiom instead of relying merely on translations, let alone on English translations solely, no matter how pivotal those are to both World Literature as a scholarly domain and to world literature as a literary production arena and, generally speaking, object of World Literature.1 But, on the whole, the worlding of comparative literature can be seen as yielding or, better yet, as

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bringing back and updating, in response to cultural, economic, and cognitive pressures by the historically unmatched global mutations of the Cold War’s aftermath, the World Literature model of understanding and analyzing literary practices and their sociocultural underpinnings and ramifications.

WELTLITERATUR, ANSATZPUNKT, PARADIGM SHIFT This model is not entirely new, then. On one side of modernity, its roots push all the way back into the dawn of rhetoric, Biblical studies, philology, and, later on, into the infancy of comparative literature, to which—nota bene—early-mid-1800s visionary glosses by German thinkers on Weltliteratur have been indisputably foundational. While the term itself is not Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s coinage, some of the epoch’s most famous and trailblazing considerations on the subject were. Made by him between mid-1820s and 1832, they were recorded chiefly in Johann Peter Eckermann’s Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, known in the Anglophone world as Conversations with Eckermann.2 Goethe’s observations were followed by a no less celebrated paragraph in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s 1848 Communist Manifesto.3 Invoked ritualistically by the participants in our time’s World Literature debates, these assertions articulate a Weltliteratur notion loosely but constantly in overt opposition to what Marx and Engels castigate as nationale Einseitigkeit und Beschränktheit—“national one-sidedness and narrowness” (or “parochialism”).4 Of course, it has become de rigueur to point up the notion’s vagueness and contradictions. But if it has been front and center to World Literature’s comeback, that is due to a conceptual core not only sufficiently recognizable by us today but also speaking to our post-1989 world condition. For, shaping this condition decisively and thus essentially defining what World Literature was and is are driving forces and traits, not unlike those giving birth to Goethe, Marx, and Engels’s “bourgeois” era. The difference lies principally in their updated technological accoutrements and in the bigger scale of intensity and extensiveness on which they are playing out at present. In the main, those agents and attributes consisted for Goethe, Marx, and others two hundred years ago, as they do for their present followers,5 of increasingly worldwide circulation, cultural “intercourse” (Goethe’s word), mutual influence, reception, and translation of literary material, which were and are all made possible by, and in turn reinforce, the socioeconomic connectivity Marx and Engels already noticed “everywhere.”6 At any rate, neither Goethe nor his heirs would deem World Literature a mechanically summative, uniform, and uniformityinducing literary warehouse. On the side of modernity closer to us, World Literatures has been cross-fertilized and often challenged by new developments in the literary humanities and social sciences. On this account, too, the World Literature idea by and large predates the worlding of comparative literature. But what I designate by World Literature in these pages is post-Cold War World Literature or the contemporary stage of the time-honored discipline—not its birth but its rebirth in a specific and specifically redefining geohistorical context; in it, Goethe’s wellknown 1827 imperative prophecy “the age of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach” sounds truer and, to some at least, more urgent than ever.7 The return of a familiar intellectual tradition in the “World Literature turn” does not take anything away, however, from the magnitude of what we have been witnessing for thirtyodd years, and whether this revival displaces, sublates, or updates comparative literature, the worlding in play here is momentous; we are witnessing, I contend, nothing less than a Paradigmenwechsel.

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In what follows, I review this shift by addressing succinctly a range of intertwined topics. Some of them pertain to World Literature’s epistemological apparatus, viz., to what the latter is and means as an intellectual pursuit these days; to what World Literature does concretely or how it produces knowledge as it grapples with its intimidatingly voluminous and multifaceted object; to how World Literature has come about, or, again, how it has come back, why, and in reaction to what; and to the disciplinary and interdisciplinary implications of its resurgence. Broached toward the end of my contribution are prevailingly ontological and ethical-political issues prompting interrogations such as: What kind of “world” do we have in “World Literature”? Is that world the same as the one the discipline aspires or should aspire to? How does that world concept tie into cognate yet distinct notions such “earth,” “globe,” and “planet”? What do world, worlding, planet, and planetarization do that globe and globalization cannot or would not do? While some of the answers my intervention provides attest to an emerging consensus, others may satisfy fewer readers. I assume this disparity, but I would also point out that it is not unrelated to the internal dynamic of a still unsettled inquiry terrain whose fluidity invites, especially at this stage, discrepant stabilizing attempts and, with them, disputes ranging from substantial to the usual turf skirmishes. It is unlikely, though, that diverging World Literature models and applications will eventually align. Nor should they, I suggest. As David Damrosch, twenty-first-century World Literature’s leading authority, and others have emphasized, the very territory in question lends itself inherently to multiple ways of mapping and reading its expressive topography, all of them a function of the cartographer-reader’s particular self-positioning in this restless space. This is as much as saying that defining and, more importantly, doing World Literature are a markedly personal venture. This cognitive foray is more “perspectival,” more “anamorphotic”—and thereby more contentious8—than other interpretive exploits insofar as it reflects, and in effect requires, what Erich Auerbach termed Ansatzpunkt in his famous 1952 article “Philologie der Weltliteratur.”9 A “point of departure” or “handle, as it were, by which the subject can be seized,” an Ansatzpunkt, he explained, “must be the election of a firmly circumscribed, easily comprehensible set of phenomena whose interpretation is a radiation out from them and which orders and interprets a greater region than they themselves occupy.”10 What Auerbach delineates here is a “world philologist’s” individual “entry point.” At once distinct from and germane to it is World Literature’s own, disciplinary access to world literature. For, through its very name and genealogy, World Literature lays bare its overall ethnocultural-historical Ansatzpunkt and, by the same token, double bind. They will both remain a prerequisite to and a check on World Literature scholarship until, as Thomas O. Beebee writes, “the next step in world literature”—“the activation of a [genuinely] world literary theory and world literary criticism”—has been completed so as to allow for enough Ansatzpunkte susceptible to “order” the variegated world literary archive into constellations of meaning and form less beholden to World Literature’s Weltliteratur pedigree and to Western inheritance more broadly.11 While today’s World Literature critics and theorists are struggling to nuance the disciplinary vantage point that, in Goethe’s Weltliteratur vision itself, could not but shrink ethnocentrically the acumen and scope of Auerbachian “intuition,” the same critics would do well to acknowledge that World Literature will always be, explicitly or implicitly, a necessarily collective undertaking in which—and because—unescapably partial insights must balance and complement each other. An apparently paradoxical glue of World Literature as a discipline, this limited purview and, bound up with it, the variety of entry points, directions, coverages, and foci ought not only to be owned up to but also leveraged as a premise to build on. The

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“limitation” here is a blessing in disguise. For one thing, it is not quantitative; it does not stem, as Franco Moretti and others have complained, from how little one can read compared to the daunting world literature output. For another, and more notably still, it is not at all a shortcoming, something one must yet, alas, cannot “overcome.”12 Deriving from the very nature of what we are dealing with, from what World Literature’s object structurally amounts to, the partiality is, I maintain, productive or can be harnessed to positive, deontological work. If approached properly, this very ontology of world literature can serve as an ethical foundation and driver of World Literature itself; it can provide another starting point for the worlding and coming together of the field and its students themselves around a subject matter that intrinsically calls on them to do just that—work together, “correct” and “supplement” each other, and learn from one another’s “syntheses” while collating them, step by step, into the ever-in-progress, forever tentative, ineludibly mosaic-like World Literature panorama of world literature.

NETWORK, NETWORK-READING, AND THE PROBLEM OF SCALE A trope, a theme, an author, or a larger corpus of a certain era, the Ansatzpunkt represents the passageway between the World Literature critic’s initial intuition and his or her intended “synthesis.” As Jérôme David observes in his jestingly Eckermannian rollcall of Goethean revenants rubbing shoulders in the intellectual high drama of World Literature rediviva, intuition is here quasi synonymous to Gianbattista Vico’s ingenium.13 When approached “ingeniously,” a text, set of texts, or figura opens a window into the much ampler literary ensemble whose survey is the synthetic account the critic should ultimately produce. To get there, one brings to fruition one’s original insight, whose fundamental thrust is, as Auerbach put it, “coadunatory,” and whose movement he described as “centrifugal radiation.”14 Starting small and following his or her ingenium across the gradually unearthed lattice of associations as far as possible, Auerbach’s World Literature student reconstitutes the network of relationships in which his or her textual point of departure is enmeshed as a genetic location of other texts, as an echo of other originating works whose own seeds had been sown by other works before them, as a crossroads of diachronic and synchronic literary-cultural encounters, and so forth. This is what World Literature roughly involves, what it basically does qua reading protocol. As such, this is also a key “metadisciplinary” Ansatzpunkt of sorts, the locus where a World Literature definition might and, to my mind, should begin. More specifically: this World Literature point or feature is the reading mechanics Auerbach’s mathematical and geometrical metaphors help us picture and the discipline’s today proponents theorize and practice. Thus, not only is World Literature a mode of reading; World Literature is, first and foremost, a reading of, and programmatically for, the temporal and spatial, symbolic and material network or networks across which work X or motif Y has been engendered and which in turn said work or motif has enlarged or modified by interfacing with, resonating in, or spawning other similar entities.15 Coming to grips with World Literature as a comparative concept and activity entails, then, a sound grasp of the network’s parameters and of what it takes to canvas it. While network itself is something new neither as a concept nor as a cultural reality, post-Cold War World Literature’s predilect reading networks are. In worlding the two-centuryold discipline of comparative literature, World Literature sets out to piece together in its

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various projects literary and cultural-economic, human and nonhuman webs of “radiation” that, characteristically, are themselves worlded in the sense that they are no longer hemmed in or organized spacewise predominantly, not to say exclusively, around national scalarity and timewise only or chiefly around period, nationhood’s historical correspondent.16 Deeptime and deep-space interpretations of American classics such as Henry David Thoreau by Wai Chee Dimock’s, environmental criticism by Ursula K. Heise, and Alexander Beecroft’s explorations of literary macrosystems have rescaled their investigations not to do away with the “national” or the “local” but to refocus them sub- and transnationally, enriching them, in fact, as concepts and realities by remapping the site-specific, the idiomatic, the national, and their literary “allegories” as intersections, shades, and encodings of geocultural actors, units, and systems both smaller and bigger than those circumscribed by national territory.17 On this account, it is not hard to see why neocosmopolitan studies, global studies, Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory, Manuel Castells’s “world network society,” and systems and network theories in general have been particularly seminal to World Literature. They have laid out persuasive rationales for national archives’ affiliations not just with other national patrimonies—comparative literature’s traditional bread and butter, as we shall note momentarily—but with different cultural actors, spaces, energies, and trajectories. The difference is of structure and span. More and more “worldly” every day, the new players, sites, and channels of literary production, reproduction, and consumption are less and less reiterations and surrogates of the national matrix and taxonomies, while reaching, in the same vein, ever more boldly beyond the national, the regional, the continental, and even the hemispherical. Furthermore, what they produce and make available to reading is not only a contemporary literature itself increasingly worlded and the vast, intricate circuitries that bring it about. Once its participants, rules, and outcomes have been clarified, their very play also flaunts ways to read—to “network-read”—the literature of past ages in and with the world. No less fruitful have been the theoretical suggestions supplied by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s rhizome, and for good reason. World-network reading, World Literature’s signature endeavor, foregrounds both genetically (in terms of how literature and culture come about) and analytically (in terms of how this production can be traced back to its “origins” and made sense of) not so much the upward movement of what Ulrich Beck and others have named “methodological nationalism,” the tree-like vertical springing and blossoming of a literature solidly, immutably, and exemplarily rooted in the homeland’s soil, but a more horizontal, drifting and diffusive motion.18 The rhizome fosters a less centered, multidirectional vagrancy and proliferation of vegetative matter—a wholly different horticultural and germinative metaphorics altogether. The rhizome’s developmental principle is not embodied in the “cognitive metaphor” of the tree trunk and its sedentary and solitary growth inside the national hothouse—“nation[-]states cling to … trees and branches,” conjectures Moretti19— but in the lateral and hybridizing dissemination and cross-pollination of all manner of plant life outgrowing the proverbial Voltairean gardens. Moretti’s “tree” and “wave” are evolutionary and distributive genre schemes that both illustrate and simplify this luxuriant dynamic a great deal. The Wood Wide Web, the coral reef, the internet, the Borgesian Aleph and Babel library, the virus and, more broadly, culture as a fundamentally contagious phenomenology are, alongside the rhizome, among the alternatives that have been offered up, with varying degrees of success, to make more palpable the turn away from a nationalist-exceptionalist paradigm of rooted, geographically discrete, linguistically monolithic, and ethnoculturally “representative” literature to a worlded model of routed and de facto continuously rerouted, “impure” texts and textual material.20

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All in all, it would be fair to say that comparative literature, including comparative in its “multicultural phase,” was based on the former, and that it was, as such, an extension and a hierarchically organized agglutination of modern, largely Herderian national literary historiographies. Thus itself nationally “rooted,” comparative literature was bound to be and in some comparatist quarters still is a “rigged,” lopsided inter-nationalism. In this comparativeliterature model, the nation-state’s territorially defined literature has served as its basic unit of analysis, and the French, British, German, and, after the Second World War, American literary nationalisms has directed, out of their disproportionately authoritative urban centers of prestige and cultural legitimation, a comparative traffic from which they stood and stand to benefit, as Pascale Casanova has demonstrated.21 It is from the same capitals of cultural capital and primarily from Paris and its Sorbonne hotbed of comparatism that benchmarks of “universality” have been, with a supreme paradox, arrogantly extrapolated and reinforced by littérature universelle—to this very day, this is comparative literature’s other name in France, Francophone countries, and other places around the world where French comparatism has reproduced itself as “modernized” comparative literature discourse and institutions such as academic departments, curricula, degrees, and journals. Has post-Cold War World Literature tolled the death knell of the “French idiosyncrasy,” aka the “universal” and of “universal literature” in comparatism?22 Whether this has occurred or not, the transcendental lure and the resilience of the universal are not to be underestimated inside national literary histories either. The “natural” access or ascent to an otherwise quite “provincial” universality has been the white lie told by littérature universelle throughout modernity, as well as the promise comparative literature qua universal literature has been making to “lesser” (“peripheral,” “smaller,” “unknown”) national literatures. No wonder the worlding of comparative literature, particularly in the context of runaway globalization, has also worried scholars devoted “solely” to the study of national literatures (as if the Beschränktheit of focus were warranted, or affordable, in the twenty-first century—we saw that Marx and Engels found it out place in the mid-nineteenth century already). Where Moretti’s tree vision “allowed comparative philology to solve that great puzzle which was also perhaps the first world system of culture: Indo-European” and has enabled the Italian critic himself to trace the novel’s world itineraries, the tree cared for—and often planted—by post-Romantic literary historiography bears witness not only to the segregated horticultural ethos portrayed above but also to an equally ingrown epistemology.23 Both perceive World Literature as a menace, and one must say that World Literature does threat, or critiques rather, the old ways of literary history. This critique is constructive and long overdue. Besides individual contributions by scholars, its venues have been existing or redesigned academic programs, as well as newly minted publications such as Brill’s Journal of World Literature and, above all, Bloomsbury’s Literatures as World Literature series edited by Beebee. The single most impactful initiative of this kind, it has brought out since its 2016 inauguration with German Literature as World Literature, edited by Beebee himself, a good number of path-breaking books. These include American Literature as World Literature (2018), Romanian Literature as World Literature (2018), Francophone Literature as World Literature (2020), Modern Indian Literature as World Literature (2021), Roberto Bolaño as World Literature (2017), Surrealism as World Literature (2017), Crime Fiction as World Literature (2017), and Philosophy as World Literature (2020), to list but a few. Outside the series have come out, also from Bloomsbury, monographs like Lucas Thompson’s Global Wallace: David Foster Wallace and World Literature (2017).

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“AFTER” (POSTCOLONIALISM, POSTMODERNISM, HUMANISM … ) These titles are relevant in and of themselves. What they tell us is that the worlding of foci, methodologies, and vocabularies is making inroads, beyond comparative and national literature scholarship, into adjacent literary research areas traditionally cohering around nationhood and whose Herderian-Hegelian brief has been the production of narratives of the national “spirit”’s coming into its own through an “organic evolution” of a country’s arts.24 Alongside a sizeable amount of volumes and articles published elsewhere, the Bloomsbury books on Francophone, Indian, Brazilian, African, and other literatures indicate that one such zone is postcolonial analysis. In fact, in few places is today’s tectonics of disciplinary realignments more ostensible and more passionately disputed than along the border between postcolonial studies and World Literature. Well-established and still informing plenty of job descriptions, the former remains indebted to the nationalist model of culture and consequently plies a largely monorelational reading informed by antinomies such as metropolis-colony, empire-postimperial nation, master-slave, hegemony-resistance, and center-periphery. World Literature’s renaissance cannot but resurvey, complicate, and otherwise encroach on postcolonial studies’ geographical fief and methodology by focusing on an admittedly more complex, polyrelational, and multidirectional ensemble of links, nodes, and network centers. A new world formation, this aggregate cuts across former and extant empires and the hypernationalisms underwriting them and upgrades its investigations for geocultural units such as the interregional, the cross-indigenous, the “Global South,” and the world as a whole. The nation-state crisis and the rise of non-statal entities such as TNCs, NGOs, as well as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s “multitudes” are phenomena partly parallel to the postcolonial–World Literature opposition, as they account, also in part, for postcolonialism’s misgivings as a field whose critical gauges and conceptual grids have been put to test by the new world order of late globalization. “From the ex-colony to the world” has been the direction followed by World Literature critics, and, in certain cases, by poets and novelists known as postcolonial themselves; not only that, but some of these writers have also pointed out that decolonization runs in the same direction while adjudications of postcoloniality risk perpetuating colonial, exotic, and self-marginalizing status. This very claim has been made by the contributors to the 2007 Pour une littérature-monde manifesto coedited by Michel Le Bris and Jean Rouaud, a book—if not a movement—whose vision of literature and the contemporary world hews closely to World Literature’s.25 Recognizing and welcoming the similitudes, the editors of Francophone Literature as World Literature insist in the introduction to their essay collection that, “[a]t the same time, … the World Literature-inflected reading model should be no license for sidelining past and present tensions and culturally granular realities, which less historically and politically attuned theorizations and applications of revived Goethean Weltliteratur to Francophone and other literary patrimonies have sometimes short-shrifted.”26 The opening modifier of the quoted sentence—one formulated by World Literature advocates also active in other fields, including postcolonialism—bodes well for a future of mutual exigency and inspiration when postcolonial and World Literature scholars alike will be more amenable to dialogue and self-revision. To be sure, the nationalist tunnel vision makes for a serious epistemological handicap; there is something deeply beschränkt about limning ethnicity, nationality, nationhood, and the nation (before, after, and, as in indigenous studies, outside self-determining statehood) as pre- or unworlded enclaves. On the other hand, even though “De-enclaving”—désenclavement, writes

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David27—is exactly what World Literature has been calling for all along, such efforts have been sometimes perceived as insufficient. Biased or not, the perception can be discouraged by the interpretive respect World Literature must continue to display for the “granular realities” of world literature. After all, one can be myopic, critically speaking, irrespective of scale. Where the national literature and postcolonial critic may fail to make out the forest, the World Literature scholar risks missing, if not the botanic fiction of the standalone tree, then plant life at a more molecular level. Not only are both scales—as there are also other scalar levels in between them—required in various ratios regardless of field, but, as I have argued at length elsewhere, the micro- and macro-optical must work together like the two arms of a scissors.28 What makes this collaboration particularly important in World Literature is the discipline’s built-in “abstraction regime.”29 Guiding the critic across world networks with an inquisitive knack unmatched by other academic pursuits, the regime is not to be disavowed. Here as in cognate “macroscopic” areas such as oceanic and hemispheric studies, its proclivities, however, must be fine-tuned contextually lest the network photos they help develop get, as some have warned, too grandiose and aerial to reveal much of cultural, historical, or political value.30 Attention to a literary culture’s small print and to what that print intimates between its lines stylistically and otherwise will always hold a major role in World Literature projects no matter how large the distances, surfaces, and data they handle. At the same time, “distant,” “surface,” and quantitative (big data) reading are no substitute and so far have offered no plausible rationales for dispensing with close engagement with texts qua texts, if not with close reading per se. In line with these caveats, it bears accentuating that, since World Literature’s object is not a totality, neither are the webs whose stories World Literature tells. As I have specified, these narratives span worlds. They read those worlds together; they do not cover those worlds exhaustively. More likely, they are ways of crossing such worlds and “angles” on them rather than complete worlds themselves, and they can always be retold by resetting their focus. To reiterate, one must reckon with a certain incompleteness of perspective or approach. At the same time, one must be aware of the complexity of the task at hand, and some of the most exciting work in World Literature so far has been mindful of the intricate co-articulations of the intertextual and the intercultural in the world-networked forging and absorption of the world’s literature. Due to World Literature practitioners’ keenness on the culturally “thick” texture of the webs in which the textual and the aesthetic serve as carriers and conduits for class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, ability, and faith, and where, conversely, such identity vectors and sociohistorical formations undergird literary representations, cultural studies may well get a new lease on life as World Literary and Cultural Studies. Furthermore, neither culture nor culture understood anthropocentrically is the only sphere in which World Literature tracks literary processes. Deeply impacted by animal studies, New Materialism, ecocriticism (“with” and “without” nature), the Anthropocene as a novel critical category, the latest avatars of trans-, in-, and post-humanism, as well as the twentyfirst-century headway of informatics and the digital humanities, World Literature has of late refined and expanded its network conceptualizations beyond the human, the animate, and the sentient. It has become obvious to those pushing the twenty-first-century comparative literature agenda that an authentically worlded discipline must be interdisciplinary, and, further, that interdisciplinarity must mean owning up to what “worlded” truly denotes or ought to denote today, namely, a world of worlds or network of networks where literary and biocultural webs underlay, overlay, and are entangled with others outside the conventional

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sites, forms, and definitions of rationality, expression, life, and existence. This realization has driven the inter- and cross-domain impetus of World Literature textual and cultural analysis into the interspecies realm and, past it, into an even “flatter,” more egalitarian ontology, now also home to thing-like, inorganic existents. The world expanses a writer like Franz Kafka, for example, traverses and organizes into what I have called the “Kafka network” bring together that which can be viewed as a spacedout, vastly heterogeneous Kafka family of kindred if distanced spirits that encompasses and is in turn enhanced and elucidated by the presence of human and nonhuman “Kafkians” in it.31 These are agents of the Kafkaesque, and their job is to world the entity or object known as “Kafka.” Productive as well as reproductive, these actors both bring Kafka’s work into the world and propagate it across continents. One category or network of Kafkian actors comprises Kafka himself (the “biographical” individual and the author), his “precursors”—in the strong sense of the term but also in the T. S. Eliotian sense rehearsed by Jorge Luis Borges in his 1951 essay “Kafka and His Precursors”—and Kafka’s heirs as well. Worth mentioning under the same heading are authors and entire bodies of work (such as Hasidic tales) that rehearse Kafkaesque themes or make references to Kafka and his oeuvre but also writers who, more obliquely, force us to consider Kafka as their “precursor.” These are legion, from Bruno Schulz and Max Blecher to Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Nicole Krauss, in whose 2017 novel Forest Dark a Zionist Kafka is imagined making Aliyah, and farther away, to J. M. Coetzee, Haruki Murakami, Latin America’s magical realists, and Romania’s greatest Blecherian, Mircea Cărtărescu. Intertwined with this cluster of human nodes in the network is the other, nonhuman Kafkian family. As Foer and, before him, Walter Benjamin proposed, this includes animals and, as I would add also under Benjamin’s tutelage, the most “forgotten” among the Kafkian and non-Kafkian family members: inanimate yet far from “dead” things. A reasonably comprehensive account of the “worlded Kafka”—of what the world means in his work and vice versa—cannot ignore the continuum of human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic modes of being, as the skyrocketing popularity of Kafka’s Odradek among “flat ontology” critics goes to show.32 On still another level, such an account must chart the roaming of the Kafkaesque outside the storyworld ecologies, across the nonfictional world’s commercial, cultural, and linguistic systems of publication, editing, distribution, translation, promotion, institutional legitimation and canonization, education, censorship, piracy, and so forth. Key to world literature as a “first-order” phenomenon is a worlded, geo-sociology of success by which works “gain,” as Damrosch and others have cogently observed by echoing another Goethean insight, while they go places, are reissued, translated, interpreted, rewritten, performed, adapted to other media, and otherwise recirculated.33 As one can see, world literature as a “primary” corpus dealt with by World Literature features substantial second-order components. These are elements of the “meta” kind like processing, reprinting, reworking, translation, and reading. The latter remains, of course, a cardinal disciplinary attribute of World Literature; as for translation, it is a field and a profession complete with its own set of competencies, talents, and venues. Nonetheless, they both are, these days more than ever before, also implicated in world literature genetically, before it becomes subject to transmission, selection, recycling, marketing, audience response, and other “sociological” protocols. A dazzling array of second-order scenarios ranging from instantaneous, multi-locational release, simultaneous, actual or simulated, translations, reviewing, and other types of publication-related commentary and promotion to more sophisticated perusal, writing, and rewriting of academic and literary kind already embed the sociological, or the geo-sociological, rather, into the poetics of world literature.

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WRITING, TRANSLATION, AND “WORLD” GENRES In other words, reading, translation, and related operations usually associated with literary remaking “always already” participate in the making of world literature tout court. They are a matter of poiesis or origination. This means that translation is more than about what an original work “gains” or “loses” in its ulterior translation and more than about how rendition of “originals” into “foreign” languages enriches or, as Emily Apter has contended, impoverishes and levels out the world’s literary landscape.34 The point is not so much what happens to literature once it has been produced and subsequently reproduced in another idiom through translation or whether it is translatable or untranslatable—incidentally, it is both. The point is that world literature and, in all actuality, more and more any sort of literature nowadays are effectively “born translated” one way or the other, and so are arguably many authors themselves, who write in tongues of adoption or in more than one language, who reside, permanently or not, in adoptive countries, and who have multiple associations, affiliations, and loyalties not only linguistically but also culturally, politically, religiously, and ethnoracially; the point is that translation and other categories of reproduction do not come after but during production, for they are crucial steps of originating procedures.35 The broader and more significant point still, apropos of the “origination” of world literature “originals,” a point ever more pertinent to all literature “after” postmodernism and postcolonialism and especially after their more worlded post–Cold War transmogrifications, concerns the very practice and understanding of originality, of what makes a work original and ultimately valuable in our world—namely, not putatively static, cloistered origins, trees bearing “new” fruit, as noted earlier, inside their fenced-in national arboretums, but de- and transterritorial ramifications and cross-fertilization, the spectacle itself of textual material’s vagrancy, multiplication, alteration, and transformation. With world literature, originality, creation, and significance have not been decoupled from place and location. Instead, what this entire genetic motility suggests, and what it practically accomplishes, is a way of connecting all these sites and of setting them in motion. It is this motion itself that engenders the work and by the same movement—quite literally—redefines originality as derivation and drift (dérive in French) that close the gap between “original” and “copy,” central “origin” and “imitative” periphery, call and response, self and other, “worlded” and (yet or putatively) “unworlded.” More than anything else, World Literature is, it seems to me, all about grasping the evolving cultural ontology of these gaps—in plainer English, about how distances that keep apart morph into distances that draw closer, correlate, and world the world’s writings by inscribing them into expansive circuits and cycles of creation and recreation. The discipline reports on this dynamic, the forces involved, and the outcomes, and it bears stressing apropos of the latter that those who promote the retooling of comparative literature as World Literature see neither the worlding of literary production itself nor the worlding of comparatism as having equalizing, stereotyping, or generalizing consequences. Goethe’s vision itself was not cumulative but relational, and for those following in his footsteps today, World Literature is even less the grand total of works produced by each national literature or, more selectively, just the canonical crème de la crème of this production (“world masterpieces”). On the formal side of World Literature inquiries, things look even more interesting. Apart from translation, which has been emerging as a genre in and of itself, no longer dependent on “originals,” critics have identified literary formations, aesthetic categories, morphologies, techniques, and enterprises—some woolier than others—that appear to mobilize worldliterary energies and capture the worlding mechanics of our world more genuinely than better

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established forms: “world poetry”; “World Bank Literature”; “world-system literature”; littérature mondiale; “comparison literature”; “transcultural narrative”; the “planetary poem;” “the post-9/11 novel;” the “cosmopolitan,” “world,” “global,” “transnational,” “international,” and “geopolitical novel”; and “electronic literature as world literature.”36 This is an incomplete list, but the literary developments on it are considered largely positive, unlike, say, the “world fiction” varieties Casanova enumerates in her own, flip inventory. What the French critic called, in English and quite disparagingly, “world fiction” can be recognized, according to her, formally (in some kind of “exotic” and “light,” accessible literary formula such as travel writing), sociologically (writing for a particular, “inter-” or “denationalized” jet-setters and other superficially cosmopolitan folk), or as a new, world market-oriented author category (“world authors” like Salman Rushdie, Umberto Eco, and Dan Brown, all presumably adroit, thought Casanova, at catering to this privileged public).37 Whether they are comfortable under such rubrics or not, authors as distinct as Murakami, David Mitchell, Emily St. John Mandel, Mohsin Hamid, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Yoko Tawada, and Jhumpa Lahiri show clearly that the intervals and discrepancies across which the world itinerancy, generation, and regeneration of literary works, themes, and structures unfold do not vanish once these processes have been completed. Distances, the physical world’s spatial wounds, do not disappear magically, neither do the world’s socioeconomic fractures and disparities heal as if by literary or critical fiat. Much like world literature itself, World Literature is not a passport to utopia, not by a long shot, and any attempt to portray it as comparative literature’s latest failure to face the world consequences of “combined and uneven development,” as the Trotskyite mantra has it, is disingenuous.38 What is not, however, is living up to the responsibility coming with this awareness and asking what kind of world the world in World Literature is or should be. What sort of world are comparatists mapping and projecting after the worlding of comparative studies?

WORLDING, WORLDVIEW, PLANET The usual answers drag us into another contested problematics: globalization. What gets lost in the shuffle, though, is the degree to which the hegemonic rhetoric of “globe” and “globalism,” irrespective of its pro- or anti-neoliberal inflections, already construes the world’s worlding in a certain way, thus ending up, ironically enough, further homogenizing the world, making it into a conquerable and commodifiable place rather than providing for its remaking. In this rhetoric, globalization is uniformly treated, approvingly or not, as the only worlding scenario or as the only sort of globalization imaginable. Yet “globe” is neither “world” nor all the world can be; it is the mainstream discourse of globalization that often gives the ideological illusion of this equivalence. This discourse tends to naturalize itself as the default modality and thus globalize itself over, and at the expense of, other kinds of talking about and behaving in the world. This is why we forget that “world,” “globe,” “planet,” and “earth” are not synonymous and therefore cannot be used interchangeably. The distinctions among them supply the conceptual steppingstone to critical action about and in the world. When represented as “globe,” assumed to be one in most accounts of globalization, “world” is not an open biocultural system, our natural environment/ground (the “earth”), or our cosmic address (“Earth”), but a mundane whole that flaunts its totality. The global world purports to be a well-rounded, integrated existentially and politically definitive, closed system, a teleology enforced from centers of power by feedback loops, symmetries, and giveand-take across a web of links overlapping with the world itself. The world worlds into globe

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or goes global once the infinite and multitudinous potentiality of worldly ontology has been repurposed materially and conceptually as domains of the one, the circular, the repetitive, and the selfsame. Topologically, both the empirical world and the globe are measurable, even though the world remains a resilient trope and space of the variegated, mysterious, and illimitable and thus considerably more complex structurally than the globe. The difference between them does not lie in volume, scope, or geometry but in ontology, culture, and politics. Redolent of the “centering” and “smoothing” technology of control, command, and monitoring that went into its making, the globe is a controlled system and a containment fantasy, a disciplined panopticon and a limit. It is an ontic terminus to what world ontologies and those in them can be. The globe is or rather becomes, through the very rhetoric presuming to critique it, a multitude, a multiplicity, and a potentiality shrunk down to numbers. The world and the globe are both immensities; both boggle the mind quantitatively. But, unlike the world and insofar as it results from relationally totalizing reinscriptions of the world, the globe is no longer an open-ended boundlessness and thus a project. Once it has been brought under the regime of rational calculability as globe, largely on economic, administrative, and technological grounds—whether through neo-imperial geopolitics and unification of financial markets or through rhetorical overadjudication—“world” is reduced ontologically and does not function as an endless realm of qualitative leaps, as a playground of being any more. This ontological reduction has left its imprint on the entire paradigm of globality. I have argued previously and repeat here that “planet” can be an alternative to this paradigm.39 A terminological hub of the alternate model of planetarity, “planet” has been central to scholars’ recent efforts to project a world increasingly at odds with the mainstream definitions of “globe.” Granted, there are many overlaps between the two. In some ways, “planet” is a subset of “global,” and, if there is something like planetary studies these days, it would not have been possible without the explosion of global studies in the early 1990s. And yet the world in “planet” is a different kettle of fish, and, I submit, it is this world model that World Literature must envisage. For “planet” is not an accomplished oneness, a structured, coherently administered, and quantifiable geopolitical expanse. Therefore, this system is characterized, both geoculturally and epistemologically, by manifoldness, open-endedness, and sociocultural and political potentialities. Both in world literature and in the surrounding world itself, there are plenty of elements to suggest that the planet is not a finite, closed system properly speaking. Its finitude is only spatial and material (planet qua earth), and it begins to reveal itself as such to humans gradually, from space or on the ground, in the second half of the twentieth century. Other than that, its system is mutating, and its architecture and meaning do remain exceptionally complex, topoculturally shifty and slippery, hard to pin down analytically. Neither an attained ad quem nor a teleology, the planet is a soft system, actually, reveling in its boundlessness: young, evolving and expanding, at once strong and vulnerable; a world but not the world, it is a “webbed interrelatedness” covering most of the world but not coterminous with it.40 If it is a world system, the planet is so under the aegis of the toposystemic “relativity” Wallerstein draws attention to through the spelling of his celebrated catchphrase. As he tells us, “we are talking not about systems, economies, empires of the (whole) world, but about systems, economies, empires that are a world (but quite possibly, and indeed usually, not encompassing the entire globe).”41 The planet, then, is not a globality. Therefore, it cannot be a totality either, at least in a monistic sense. Ontologically and philosophically, it is not coextensive with our existential and cognitional gamut as humans, with all we can be

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and envisage, let alone that the human world is one way of mapping the world of worlds, one exercise in cartographic rationality. Again, the planet does not span the entire world understood as geophysical earth, which is only the planet’s cosmic background, physical foundation, and natural stage. As a world system, the planet looks, stresses Wallerstein, like a “spatial/temporal zone which cuts across many political and cultural units.”42 The planetary system is, then, partially systemic in its extensity and loosely systematic in its intensity or functioning. Because it is not a totalist whole, the planet geomodel can be, geographically, culturally, and philosophically, many worlds or parts of worlds, “nested” inside each other rather than hierarchically (“vertically”) organized, and it can be so in one place no matter how small. Thus, this spatial deployment of the planetary entails a geometry quite different from the global. Correspondingly, the individual committed to a planetary Weltanschauung may see himself or herself, not unlike the Greek and Roman Stoics, as participating in a number of worlds and world orders while physically located in a particular polis or community. The planet functions as a geodiscursive projection across, astride, and sometimes against the one fixed on modern world maps by the spatiality of the nation-state and the global. In fact, spearheading as it does a cultural-imaginary remapping of the empirical world, the planetary messes deliberately with official cartography by rearranging the topographic and geopolitical distribution of space on our road atlases, maps, and GPSs so as to challenge the worldviews of such neatly delineated spatial encodings and representation regimes. In 1999, four years prior to the publication of Death of a Discipline, a milestone in “new” comparative literature, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak had already acknowledged her uneasiness with the world-leveling, universalist legacy of Western rationalism whether in economic globalism or in cultural analysis. On that occasion, she proposed “us[ing] the planetary—if such a thing could be used!—to control globalization interruptively, to locate the imperative in the indefinite radical alterity of the other space of [the] planet[,] to deflect the rational imperative of capitalist globalization.”43 In her view, life on the planet must be “lived as the call of the wholly other.”44 In my view, so must be read the literature of the world—of a planet-like world—also, and, at the end of the day, this is what World Literature’s networkreading is called on to do: read both descriptively and prescriptively (or normatively); read the world’s literature but also read for that literature’s world, more to the point, for the other world or worlds literature conjures up as it responds to the call of the world around us. My sense is that a worlded comparative literature—a comparative literature awakened to the planet—is better prepared to answer that call. I also think that this answer is urgent at a time resurgent populism threatens to drown the world’s calls in a rhetoric of walls, chauvinist exclusion, protectionism, tribalism, and segregation.

NOTES 1 I distinguish, then, between the discipline of “World Literature,” on one hand, and, on the other, “world literature” seized as the world’s literature, the output of the world’s writers. The different spellings—uppercase initials for the former and lowercase for the latter—are here conventions designed to reinforce this basic distinction. 2 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Some Passages Pertaining to the Concept of World Literature,” in Comparative Literature: The Early Years. An Anthology of Essays, eds. Hans-Joachim Schulz and Philip H. Rhein (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973), 1–11. 3 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party, in The Communist Manifesto: New Interpretations, ed. Mark Cowling, trans. Terrell Carver (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 16–17.

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4 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (London: J. E. Burghard, 1848), 466. 5 “My claim,” David Damrosch avers, “is that world literature is not an infinite, ungraspable canon of works but rather a mode of circulation and of reading, a mode that is as applicable to individual works as to bodies of material, available for reading established classics and new discoveries alike” (David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003], 5). 6 Marx and Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party, 16–7. 7 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Conversations with Eckermann on Weltliteratur,” in World Literature in Theory, ed. David Damrosch (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 19–20. 8 On the controversies spurred by World Literature as a discipline, also see Robert T. Tally Jr.’s article “World Literature and Its Discontents,” English Language and Literature 60.3 (2014): 401–19. 9 Erich Auerbach’s article “Philologie der Weltliteratur” was translated into English first by Maire Said and Edward Said. Their translation came out under the title “Philology and Weltliteratur” in The Centennial Review 13.1 (Winter 1969): 1–17. The other, more recent rendition into English, in which Weltliteratur becomes “world literature,” is by Jane O. Newman and has been included in Erich Auerbach, Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach, ed. and with an introduction by James I. Porter, trans. Jane O. Newman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 253–65. 10 Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur,” 14. 11 Thomas O. Beebee, “What the World Thinks about Literature,” in Futures of Comparative Literature: ACLA State of the Discipline Report, ed. Ursula K. Heise, with Dudley Andrew, Alexander Beecroft, Jessica Berman, David Damrosch, Guillermina De Ferrari, César Domínguez, Barbara Harlow, and Eric Hayot (New York: Routledge, 2017), 61. Also see Chen Bar-Itzhak, “Intellectual Captivity: Literary Theory, World Literature, and the Ethics of Interpretation,” Journal of World Literature 5 (2020): 79–110. 12 See, for instance, Franco Moretti’s essay “Conjectures on World Literature,” in Distant Reading (New York: Verso, 2013), 45. 13 Jérôme David, Spectres de Goethe. Les Métamprophoses de la “littérature mondiale” (Paris: Les Prairies Ordinaires, 2011), 182. 14 Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur,” 11, 15. 15 Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, 5. 16 Eric Hayot and Susan Stanford Friedman are some of the critics who have drawn parallels between nation and period as they have criticized literary studies’ excessive privileging of both. See, on this problem, Hayot’s “Literary History after Literary Dominance,” MLQ 80.4 (December 2019): 485; and Friedman’s “Alternatives to Periodization: Literary History, Modernism, and the ‘New’ Temporalities,” MLQ 80.4 (December 2019): 395. 17 Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Ursula K. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Alexander Beecroft, An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the Present Day (London: Verso, 2015). 18 One place where Ulrich Beck theorizes “methodological nationalism” is “Cosmopolitan Sociology: Outline of a Paradigm Shift,” an essay included in The Ashgate Research Companion to Cosmopolitanism, ed. Maria Rovisco and Magdalena Nowicka (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 18. 19 Moretti, Distant Reading, 59–60. 20 On World Literature, virology, and epidemiology, see my essays “Contagion, Contamination, and Don DeLillo’s Post-Cold War World-System: Steps toward a Haptical Theory of Culture,” in Contagion: Health, Fear, Sovereignty, ed. Bruce Magnusson and Zahi Zalloua (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012), 123–48; and “Is There a World Literature? Old Literary Forms and New Cultural Formations,” Euphorion 28.3 (September 2017): 84–7. 21 See Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

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22 David, Spectres de Goethe, 38. 23 Moretti, Distant Reading, 59–60. 24 Critics who have advocated and made explicit references to the “worlding” of American literature and of the study thereof include Rachel Adams, Susan Gillman, Kirsten Silva, Rob Wilson, Jason Arthur, and Leerom Medovoi. I make my own case in “Weltliterature? American Literature after Territorialism: Manifesto for a Twenty-First-Century Critical Agenda,” in American Literature as World Literature, ed. Jeffrey R. Di Leo (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), 127–47. 25 Michel Le Bris and Jean Rouaud, eds., Pour une littérature-monde (Paris: Gallimard, 2007). The book was followed by Je est un autre. Pour une identité-monde (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), also edited by Le Bris and Rouaud. 26 Christian Moraru, Nicole Simek, and Bertrand Westphal, “Introduction: Reading Francophone Literature with the World,” in Francophone Literature as World Literature, eds. Christian Moraru, Nicole Simek, and Bertrand Westphal (New York: Bloomsbury, 2020), 22. 27 David, Spectres de Goethe, 78. 28 On the “macro”–“micro” interplay, see Christian Moraru, Reading for the Planet: Toward a Geomethodology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015); and “Decompressing Culture: Three Steps toward a Geomethodology,” in The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015), 211–44. 29 David, Spectres de Goethe, 26. 30 For a critique of the epistemological shortcomings of aerial and satellite representations of the planet’s culture, see Philip Leonard, Orbital Poetics: Literature, Theory, World (London: Bloomsbury, 2019). 31 See my article “Crossing the Kafka Network: Schulz, Blecher, Foer, and the Repositioning of the Human,” in Echinox 34 (2018): 101–16. 32 On this subject, see Ian Thomas Fleishman, “The Rustle of the Anthropocene: Kafka’s Odradek as Ecocritical Icon,” in The Germanic Review 92.1 (January–March 2017), 44. In his essay, Fleishman takes issues with ecocriticism and new materialist interpretations by Timothy Morton, Jane Bennett, and J. Hillis Miller. 33 Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, 288. 34 For Emily Apter’s critique of the translatability of world literature and other kinds of discourse, see her book Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (London: Verso, 2013). 35 Rebecca Walkowitz has made a powerful and elegant case for the genetic, literally creative role of translation in Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 36 See Joseph Tabbi’s article “Electronic Literature as World Literature; or, The Universality of Writing under Constraint,” Poetics Today 31.1 (Spring 2010): 17–50. 37 See Pascale Casanova’s short article “World Fiction,” Revue de littérature générale 2 (1996): 42–5. 38 For a discussion of this problem, see WReC: Warwick Research Collective, Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015). 39 I have put forth this argument in a series of books and articles. See especially Reading for the Planet and “‘World,’ ‘Globe,’ ‘Planet’: Comparative Literature, Planetary Studies, and Cultural Debt after the Global Turn,” in Futures of Comparative Literature, ed. Ursula K. Heise, with Dudley Andrew et al., 124–33. Here and elsewhere, I also discuss the scholarship behind what Amy J. Elias and I have called “the planetary turn.” Scholars who have also insisted on the distinctions among “globe,” “world,” and “earth” and have theorized “world” and “planet” as globe alternates include Masao Miyoshi, Pheng Cheah, Eric Hayot, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, to name but a few. As is well known, Spivak draws a direct link between “planet” and comparative literature in Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). Also see Pheng Cheah, “What Is a World? On World Literature as World-Making Activity,” in Daedalus 137.3 (2008): 26–38; What Is a

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World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); Eric Hayot, On Literary Worlds (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012): and in our Handbook, the relevant section in Robert T. Tally Jr.’s “Worlding Spatiality Studies.” 40 Mary Lou Emery, “Caribbean Modernism: Plantation to Planetary,” in The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, ed. Mark Wollaeger and Matt Eatough (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 49. 41 Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 16–17. 42 Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis, 17. 43 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 348. 44 Spivak, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, 349.

WORKS CITED Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. London: Verso, 2013. Auerbach, Erich. “Philology and Weltliteratur.” Trans. Maire Said and Edward Said. The Centennial Review 13.1 (Winter 1969): 1–17. Auerbach, Erich. Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach. Ed. with an introduction by James I. Porter. Trans. Jane O. Newman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. Bar-Itzhak, Chen. “Intellectual Captivity: Literary Theory, World Literature, and the Ethics of Interpretation.” Journal of World Literature 5 (2020): 79–110. Beck, Ulrich. “Cosmopolitan Sociology: Outline of a Paradigm Shift.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Cosmopolitanism. Eds. Maria Rovisco and Magdalena Nowicka. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. 17–32. Beebee, Thomas O. “What the World Thinks about Literature.” In Futures of Comparative Literature: ACLA State of the Discipline Report. Ed. Ursula K. Heise. With Dudley Andrew, Alexander Beecroft, Jessica Berman, David Damrosch, Guillermina De Ferrari, César Domínguez, Barbara Harlow, and Eric Hayot. New York: Routledge, 2017. 61–70. Beecroft, Alexander. An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the Present Day. London: Verso, 2015. Casanova, Pascale. “World Fiction.” Revue de littérature générale 2 (1996): 42–5. Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Trans. M. B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Cheah, Pheng. What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Cheah, Pheng. “What Is a World? On World Literature as World-Making Activity.” Daedalus 137.3 (2008): 26–38. Damrosch, David. What Is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. David, Jérôme. Spectres de Goethe. Les Métamprophoses de la “littérature mondiale.” Paris: Les Prairies Ordinaires, 2011. Dimock, Wai Chee. Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. Elias, Amy J., and Christian Moraru, eds. The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015. Emery, Mary Lou. “Caribbean Modernism: Plantation to Planetary.” The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms. Eds. Mark Wollaeger and Matt Eatough. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. 48–77. Fleishman, Ian Thomas. “The Rustle of the Anthropocene: Kafka’s Odradek as Ecocritical Icon.” The Germanic Review 92.1 (January–March 2017): 40–62. Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Alternatives to Periodization: Literary History, Modernism, and the ‘New’ Temporalities.” MLQ 80.4 (December 2019): 379–402.

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Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. “Conversations with Eckermann on Weltliteratur.” In World Literature in Theory. Ed. David Damrosch. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014. 15–21. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. “Some Passages Pertaining to the Concept of World Literature.” In Comparative Literature: The Early Years. An Anthology of Essays. Eds. Hans-Joachim Schulz and Philip H. Rhein. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973. 1–11. Hayot, Eric. “Literary History after Literary Dominance.” MLQ 80.4 (December 2019): 479–94. Hayot, Eric. On Literary Worlds. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Heise, Ursula K. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Le Bris, Michel, and Jean Rouaud, eds. Je est un autre. Pour une identité-monde. Paris: Gallimard, 2010. Le Bris, Michel, and Jean Rouaud, eds. Pour une littérature-monde. Paris: Gallimard, 2007. Leonard, Philip. Orbital Poetics: Literature, Theory, World. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. Lewis, John. “Rep. John Lewis Says Video of George Floyd’s Death Moved Him to Tears: ‘The Madness Must Stop.’” CBS This Morning, June 4, 2020. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/georgefloyd-video-death-john-lewis/. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei. London: J. E. Burghard, 1848. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Manifesto of the Communist Party. In The Communist Manifesto: New Interpretations. Ed. Mark Cowling. Trans. Terrell Carver. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Moraru, Christian. “Contagion, Contamination, and Don DeLillo’s Post-Cold War World-System: Steps toward a Haptical Theory of Culture.” In Contagion: Health, Fear, Sovereignty. Eds. Bruce Magnusson and Zahi Zalloua. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012. 123–48. Moraru, Christian. “Crossing the Kafka Network: Schulz, Blecher, Foer, and the Repositioning of the Human.” Echinox 34 (2018): 101–16. Moraru, Christian. “Decompressing Culture: Three Steps toward a Geomethodology.” In The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century. Eds. Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015. 211–44. Moraru, Christian. “Is There a World Literature? Old Literary Forms and New Cultural Formations.” Euphorion 28.3 (September 2017): 84–7. Moraru, Christian. Reading for the Planet: Toward a Geomethodology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015. Moraru, Christian. “Weltliterature? American Literature after Territorialism: Manifesto for a TwentyFirst-Century Critical Agenda.” In American Literature as World Literature. Ed. Jeffrey R. Di Leo. New York: Bloomsbury, 2018. 127–47. Moraru, Christian. “‘World,’ ‘Globe,’ ‘Planet’: Comparative Literature, Planetary Studies, and Cultural Debt after the Global Turn.” In Futures of Comparative Literature: ACLA State of the Discipline Report. Ed. Ursula K. Heise. With Dudley Andrew, Alexander Beecroft, Jessica Berman, David Damrosch, Guillermina De Ferrari, César Domínguez, Barbara Harlow, and Eric Hayot. New York: Routledge, 2017. 124–33. Moraru, Christian, Nicole Simek, and Bertrand Westphal. “Introduction: Reading Francophone Literature with the World.” In Francophone Literature as World Literature. Eds. Christian Moraru, Nicole Simek, and Bertrand Westphal. New York: Bloomsbury, 2020. 1–45. Moretti, Franco. Distant Reading. New York: Verso, 2013. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Tabbi, Joseph. “Electronic Literature as World Literature; or, The Universality of Writing under Constraint.” Poetics Today 31.1 (Spring 2010): 17–50. Tally, Robert T. Jr. “World Literature and Its Discontents.” English Language and Literature 60.3 (2014): 401–19. Walkowitz, Rebecca L. Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.

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Wallerstein, Immanuel. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Westphal, Bertrand. “‘Literature Helps Worlding the World’: A Conversation with Bertrand Westphal.” Interview by Marius Conkan and Emanuel Modoc. Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory 6.1 (2020). https://doi.org/10.24193/mjcst.2020.9.02. WReC: Warwick Research Collective. Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Worlding Popular Culture ESTHER PEEREN

What does it mean to think about worlding popular culture? On the face of it, this phrase may suggest little more than an expansion of the scale on which popular culture is contemplated, just as worlding literature was taken by advocates of world literature such as David Damrosch to involve extending comparative literature’s focus from one on national literatures or Western masterpieces to one on literatures from all over the world “that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language.”1 In this conception of worlding, the world is taken “as a static, geographical expanse”2 through which literary texts chart specific, more or less predictable or capacious trajectories, with the texts themselves taken as “transparently accessible in translation.”3 Analogously, worlding popular culture would frame popular culture as a phenomenon occurring and being studied on a worldwide scale, with an emphasis on artifacts that become popular beyond their context of production. This would be much less of a shift in perspective than the turn to world literature was in literary studies, given that the border-crossing of popular cultural artifacts such as Hollywood films has long been a prominent focus of their study. Until recently, the implications of popular culture’s worldwide spread have predominantly been theorized through the notions of globalization and transnationalism, but Klavier J. Wang’s 2020 Hong Kong Popular Culture: Worlding Film, Television, and Pop Music takes up “worlding” for this purpose.4 As is clear from its structure, which follows chapters on “making” Hong Kong film, TV, and Cantopop with chapters on “worlding” Hong Kong film, TV, and Cantopop, the book conceives of worlding as something that happens to popular cultural artifacts after they have been produced within specific borders. Although Wang does challenge the exclusive definition of contexts of production in national terms by positioning Hong Kong as first and foremost a city, her use of worlding glosses over the fact that many popular cultural artifacts, old and new, are destined for global circulation from their inception and more and more often take the form of international coproductions. In Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism, Koichi Iwabuchi duly emphasizes the “emergence and proliferation of global media conglomerates” in recent decades, as well as the increasingly “transnational flow of popular culture,” yet he does not fully acknowledge the extent to which these developments complicate any straightforward equation of the transnational popularity of Japanese popular culture to Japanese (cultural) power.5 The sheer persistence with which popular culture—even popular culture as always already globalized—continues to be thought of in terms of national ownership, which involves the “ascription of national characteristics to popular cultural artefacts,” is aptly highlighted and contested in Matthew Allen and Rumi Sakamoto’s edited volume Popular Culture, Globalization and Japan.6

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For popular culture, then, perhaps even more so than for literature, taking worlding as involving the dispersal of artifacts from a particular national context to other parts of the world ends up reinforcing flawed, blinkered conceptions of how popular culture works. In addition, since such conceptions—including that of popular culture’s false attachment to the national—have already been effectively dismantled in work like that of Allen and Sakamoto through the critical conscription of globalization and transnationalism, latching onto worlding for the same purpose would constitute mere faddism. Yet what if we took worlding popular culture as being about the worlding—the “bringingand-coming-into-being” of the world7—effected by and in popular cultural artifacts? In his 2017 article “Worlding Literature: Living with Tiger Spirits,” Pheng Cheah draws on Heidegger to argue that the world is not at all a “spatial container” but a “referential network of meaningfulness that precedes the rational human subject and brings us into relation with other beings.”8 From this perspective, worlding refers to “the opening of a world, where relations between subjects and objects are decomposed into a prior wholeness that supports us at the same time as it makes us defenseless as deliberating intentional subjects.”9 For Cheah, literature that “returns to the openness of world” can prompt a “re-envisioning of relations with others” and thus produce not only a trenchant critique of how the world has been ordered (for example by the notions of the rational subject and the nation-state) but also a vision of a new world based on different relations.10 Birgit Kaiser’s “Worlding CompLit” shares with Cheah a conception of worlding as being about literary texts creating world. However, instead of invoking Heidegger, Kaiser brings together the work of Karen Barad, Edouard Glissant, and Jean-Luc Nancy to propose a diffractive account of world as “intra-active relationality.”11 Far from meeting “as objects of national (or regional) descent, pre-existing their encounters in a comparison,” as Wang’s and Damrosch’s notions of worlding propose, literary texts are seen as “‘relata’ whose qualities and effects are specified by way of relating, while specifying the ‘apparatus’ (the texts, the reading and the reader) at the same time.”12 Significantly, Kaiser also moves beyond Cheah’s account of worlding by presenting the latter not as a deliberate, disintegrating intervention that enables a return to an undifferentiated “prior wholeness” wherefrom relationality can then take new forms, but as disclosing how “the world in each ‘phenomenon’ is a congealing of a continuous spacetimemattering.”13 There is, in this diffractive account, no before or after relationality, no opening up or closing of world, only a continuing co-creation of world and a question of whether particular practices of (comparative) reading do or do not acknowledge and respect how “‘world’ as the co-appearance of all relating ‘parts’” demands “a continuous faire-monde” or worldmaking.14 Can such a diffractive conceptualization of worlding be transferred to the realm of popular culture? To answer this question, it is first of all important to recognize that popular culture is a much more diffuse or “overpopulated” cultural form than literature.15 It can comprise many different media, including certain forms of literature, as well as social practices, and it refers both to mass culture as “culture which is widely favoured or well-liked by many people” and to “culture which originates from ‘the people,’” which might be folk culture, working-class culture, subculture, or counterculture.16 In the wake of Horkheimer and Adorno’s notorious takedown of the culture industry in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, mass culture has been widely disparaged as lacking critical force and as reifying advanced capitalism’s globalism. As John Storey puts it, from this perspective, “economic success is assumed to be the same as cultural imposition.”17 With cultural imposition suggesting a replication and reaffirmation of world rather than its remaking, it is hardly surprising that proponents of this take on

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popular culture regard its worlding force with skepticism. Importantly, whereas Kaiser presents worlding as something co-effected by all cultural forms, as all are among the relata whose entanglement makes up world, Cheah assigns worlding power to a certain subsection of literary works only—those that return “to the openness of world”—and considers mass culture particularly unlikely to have such power. The manner in which Cheah renders mass culture and worlding virtually incompatible is worth a close look. It starts when, in his discussion of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century “normative conception of world literature,” he identifies the rejection of mass culture as the one aspect of this normative conception that was wrongly left behind by more recent notions of world literature like Damrosch’s, which Cheah considers banalizing.18 Accordingly, Cheah approvingly notes how normative world literature’s spiritualist ideal of “revealing humanity” required the historical overcoming of “uncultivated popular taste.”19 In his view, it is precisely the renewed acceptance of uncultivated popular taste as central to world literature and global capitalism alike that precludes worlding as an opening and potential rearrangement of world. The worlding capacity of literary texts designed to appeal to globally shared popular tastes is rendered suspect by comparing these texts to a particularly uncultured and unimaginative commodity: [J]ust because some literary works are produced globally for circulation in a global marketplace does not automatically make them world literature in the normative sense unless one also says that a McDonald’s hamburger, which has been “translated” into different shapes to cater to global consumers … is similarly worldly.20 Thus, although Cheah is critical of and eager to move beyond many aspects of the normative conception of world literature, most notably its entrenched anthropocentrism, his notion of a new normative world literature revives and affirms this conception’s rejection of mass culture, which, he implies (not least through the inclusion in his article of an image of the Singaporean McDonald’s website featuring vernacularized items like the Chendol McFlurry and the Nasi Lemak Burger), it would be rather absurd to consider capable of worlding. Curiously, though, the novel through which Cheah proceeds to develop his account of worlding in the remainder of the article, Eka Kurniawan’s Lelaki Harimau (2004), translated into English as Man Tiger (2015), is described as drawing on “popular cultural influences” such as pulp fiction and comic books, as well as on “supernatural elements from Indonesian folklore and myth.”21 Lest this should appear to rehabilitate mass culture and assign it worlding power, Cheah’s discussion of the novel installs a strict separation between the two forms of popular culture at stake, mass culture and folk culture. This is achieved by temporalizing the effect of these different forms on both Kurniawan and the novel’s protagonist, Margio. Pulp fiction, comic books, and popular literature about tiger myths are presented as having impressed the writer “as a youth” and “as a child,” and as having constituted “Margio’s childhood reading.”22 Hence, in line with the normative conception of world literature, the attachment to mass culture and its imaginative power is placed in the past as something appropriately left behind in adulthood. Folk culture, in contrast, is presented as an enduring influence on Kurniawan and Margio and put at the center of Cheah’s reading of the novel as worlding literature. It is the Indonesian belief in tiger spirits that is seen to function as the ambivalent means through which “the openness of worlding” is instantiated in the novel, in a way that, crucially, also challenges the traditional form of this belief.23 Folk culture, then, is envisioned as capable of opening (up the) world by dismantling even its own established

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form, while mass culture’s worlding power, confined to the realm of immaturity, is marked as inferior. Within Cheah’s article, however, an alternative reading of mass culture is opened up by a quote from an interview with Kurniawan in which he questions why neither Kafka nor the superheroes of DC and Marvel are regarded as belonging to the genre of magical realism, despite their fantastical elements. Besides formulating a sharp critique of magical realism as a reductive category in what Cheah calls “the global literature approach”24 that makes nonWestern literature easier to process for Western readers, Kurniawan here also hints at the possibility of conceiving of Kafka, comic superheroes, and magical realist works of literature as sharing the capacity to bring alternative worlds into being through fantasy. What the quote conjures is not an image of cultural hybridity ripe for ridicule, as Cheah does with the picture of McDonald’s glocally translated burger, but one of ostensibly disparate forms of culture, including vastly popular and economically lucrative ones, as all having worlding force. In order not to be perceived as silly or naïve, such an image needs to draw on a notion of worlding that, instead of requiring it to instantiate a radical return to a “prior wholeness”25 emptied out of all existing relationalities, would be taken, following Kaiser, as an ongoing, inherently relational worldmaking that, depending on the relata’s intra-action (through which these relata themselves emerge), could move in different directions, toward or away from the homogenizing globalization Cheah has McDonald’s embody. As Christian Moraru also points out in his Reading for the Planet: Toward a Geomethodology, globalization is not the only possible or even the currently all-encompassing “worlding narrative,” for “the world remains a resilient trope and space of the variegated, the mysterious, and illimitable and thus considerably more complex as structure than the globe.”26 By opposing globe not to world, as Cheah does, but to the planetary, Moraru opens up both the notion of world and that of worlding. Worlding no longer necessarily is an opening up of world, as there can be worlding “into globe”—into “the homogenous, the circular, the repetitive, and the selfsame”—or worlding into planetarization—into the “capacious and integrative”—or even both at the same time.27 In Moraru’s words, it is precisely because the world is still worlding, coming together—because the world is (also) “planetarizing” rather than (only) globalizing—that one can take a critical“progressive” look at it and possibly “perfect” it along these lines, that is, not hone it into utopic perfection but complete it by harnessing it to a vision more inspiring and empowering than that at work in many of today’s corporatist and neoimperialistterritorialist adventures.28 Inspiring and empowering planetarizing visions of this kind may, I will argue in the remainder of this chapter, very well appear in mass culture. Jennifer Wenzel’s The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature offers another useful jumping-off point for this argument in the “capacious” framing of world literature it espouses, which involves “juxtaposing global bestsellers (often dismissed as ‘airport literature’) and visual culture with more conventionally literary texts … to consider how different kinds of texts foster and complicate the work of world-imagining and reading across geographic and experiential divides.”29 For Wenzel, worlding consists in the “work of world-imagining,” an ongoing relational process that in and of itself does not have a particular direction and in which mass culture is as much involved as any other form of culture.30 As she notes, “I understand literature and cultural imagining as a mesh of relations in which the

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liberatory and immiserating implications of globalizations—old and new—are knit and can be laid bare.”31 The pluralization of “globalizations” here indicates a refusal to equate all forms of the global to homogenization or the capitalist world market. In addition, Wenzel insists that instead of dismissing the world that corporations like McDonald’s imagine as fully alienated and not “truly human” in the manner of Cheah,32 it is important to understand how such corporate worlds contribute to shaping “the world we inhabit” and how they may be engaged with—antagonistically, but also strategically—through “world-imagining[s] from below, where marginalized characters or documentary subjects situate their precarious local condition within a transnational context.”33 From such engagements can emerge new, more inclusive worldings that nonetheless may also remain imbricated in and even to a degree complicit with corporate world-imaginings. Popular culture in all its forms may thus yield world-imaginings from below or contribute to what Moraru calls “planetary poetics.”34 Far from inevitably confirming “the prevailing constructions of globality,” or at best achieving worlding capacity only for the young and naïve, popular culture, including mass culture, may work to “connect the planet’s dots in ways that make visible new configurations, allotments, and hierarchies of space, discourse, community, and power,”35 without necessarily dissolving the old configurations entirely. Two recent mass cultural artifacts that underline both the potential and limitations of such a (re)worlding (re)connection of dots are Ryan Coogler’s 2018 film Black Panther, based on a Marvel superhero comic, and the FX channel’s television series Pose (2018–2019), which fictionalizes the underground New York ballroom scene at the height of the AIDS pandemic in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and which was recently renewed for a third season. Coogler’s Black Panther, which features a predominantly black cast led by the titular black superhero, is about as globally popular and cultural artifact as one can think of: dispelling the “black films don’t travel myth,”36 it grossed over a billion dollars worldwide in its first month.37 It was also widely seen as offering audiences—a large proportion of which were non-white38—a new perspective on the world and the position of blackness in it, through its portrayal of Wakanda, the fictional African nation from which the Black Panther hails. Renée T. White specifically positions the film as a world-imagining from below in Wenzel’s sense in a review essay entitled “I Dream a World: Black Panther and the Re-Making of Blackness.” For White, Black Panther’s “uncolonizing imagination”39 of “a wholly self-contained, autonomous African ecosystem”40 makes it an Afrofuturist project that “merge[s] culture, tradition, time, space, and technology to present alternative interpretations of blackness.”41 In addition, it shares the anticolonial Third Cinema movement’s aim of “using the tools of cultural production to mold ‘national consciousness, giving it a form and contours and flinging open before it new and boundless horizons.’”42 This, however, is not an imagination that completely decomposes world, for the alternative, never-colonized world of Wakanda is still surrounded by our twenty-first-century post/neocolonial world in which the systemic legacies of colonialism and slavery are everywhere palpable—including in the ease with which Wakanda is able to pass itself off as a poor, rural economy. In fact, the film revolves around the shifting relation between its dreamt world of Wakanda and the current world order it mirrors outside Wakanda, as the challenge brought to the reign of the current Black Panther, T’Challa, by Killmonger, the US-born and raised son of T’Challa’s uncle, leads Wakanda to emerge from its isolationist stance (which saw it intervene in global affairs only covertly) and show “itself to the world,”43 which thus turns out to never have been the (whole, true) world. It is in this idea, namely, that the world may all the time have been different from how it was hegemonically imagined, as well as in the film’s final pre-end credits scene, in which

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a Wakandan aircraft lands in Oakland, California, and a young basketball-playing boy feels himself repositioned in the world as he identifies T’Challa as the aircraft’s owner, that the (re)worlding force of Black Panther comes to the fore. White stresses that the film received a “seismic reaction from black audiences around the globe,” which experienced “mass psychic relief” at finding themselves represented from a non-mainstream (non-white) perspective.44 In her contribution to a roundtable on Black Panther in Safundi, Carli Coetzee dubs this reaction “Wakanda fever,” a term that is perhaps misplaced given her insistence that African audiences, while excited by the film’s centering of black experience, “reacted in the creative (and resistant) ways theorized by scholars of African popular cultural studies,” which included censuring its regurgitation of African and black stereotypes.45 Political geographer Robert A. Saunders, too, acknowledges Black Panther’s role as “a transformative artifact,” especially for black audiences, when he notes that “while no such nation as Wakanda exists on the map, it has become real in the minds [of] those who sat in dimly-lit theatres around the globe, thus serving a symbol of the ‘black cognitive and cultural capacities’ that have been long derided by (white) Western Civilization.”46 However, in a reading of the film that strongly resonates with Cheah’s skepticism about mass culture’s worlding power, he sees this making real of a different world—which both White and Coetzee suggest constitutes a re-worlding—as overshadowed and essentially invalidated by its status as a product of the global culture industry. The fact that Black Panther was produced by Marvel Studios LLC (owned by Disney) with the aim of making it a commercial success apparently makes it impossible for its imaginaries to be anything more than cynical co-optations— tellingly, the main title of Saunders’s article is “(Profitable) Imaginaries of Black Power”—and for its audiences to be anything other than dupes. My problem with Saunders’s reading is not that I think he is wrong to point to the aspects of Black Panther that show it to also be an affirmation of the world-as-is. It is undoubtedly true that the film reinforces a view of Africa as undifferentiated in its portrayal of Wakanda as “all over the place” in terms of its geography and the traditions it draws on.47 And the film also positions Africa as a “space of violence” by having its sole reference to events on the continent outside Wakanda evoke Boko Haram and by depicting the Black Panther succession ceremony as involving hand-to-hand combat.48 Equally, it is hard to argue with Saunders’s account of the film as espousing “monarchophilia” in its portrayal of Wakanda’s royal family (which even Killmonger turns out to be part of) or with his reading of the film’s ending as involving T’Challa “becom[ing] a convert [to] the neoliberal order.”49 This ending—and its interpretation by Saunders—deserves a little more attention because it is really a second ending, coming after the Oakland-set one discussed by White and after the film’s end credits. Showing T’Challa giving an address to the United Nations in New York and announcing Wakanda’s entry onto the world stage as an engaged global power can indeed be seen as “espousing a form of humanistic, black/brown-friendly globalism.”50 Through statements like “the illusions of divisions threaten our very division” and “we must find a way to look after one another, as if we were one single tribe,” the address dismisses movements like Black Lives Matter as misguided and conjures a post-racial future enabled not by a true reckoning with global systemic racism but by a black leader advocating colorblindness.51 Thus, Saunders has a point when he contends that this ending envisions Wakanda’s unveiled entry into the world not as transforming the UN and its hegemonic neoliberal world-imagining but as affirming it.

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Still, I want to suggest that the import of this second ending is lessened by its placement after the end credits (appearing only when most audience members who are not diehard Marvel fans will have already left the theater) and by its being followed by yet another, third ending designed to set up another film in Marvel’s superhero universe (this ending shows Winter Soldier, a character brainwashed in Captain America: Civil War [2016], being cared for in Wakanda). Saunders’s statement that “Marvel Studios uses the last moments of its highly-profitable geopolitical intervention to sell its audience a faulty ‘universalism’ girded by the ‘inevitability’ of the global success of the neoliberal project”52 is therefore not accurate and underlines precisely how viewers of mass cultural artifacts, far from being passive receivers of a message sent by the artifact’s maker (a message that in itself may not be coherent and a maker that is never a singular entity), are in fact active co-creators of this message through the different perspectives they bring to a film like Black Panther and the selective ways in which they watch and remember it. The film’s three endings are, of course, part of a commercial ploy to line up audiences for the next Marvel superhero movie, but they also enable different viewers to come to different conclusions about what world-imagining(s) the film ultimately presents or privileges. For Saunders, the second ending eclipses the other two endings (which he does not refer to at all), just as the fact that the film can be seen as “a for-profit co-optation of black suffering on [a] political-economic level” trumps all other possible ways of reading it.53 If, as the title of his article already suggests, a profitable imagination cannot be a truly resistant one, then those who insist that they are capable of watching Black Panther as worlding world simultaneously, ambiguously, according to (stereo)type and beyond it (into globe and planet, to speak with Moraru) can only be regarded as hopelessly naïve. The latter charge is particularly problematic when it is leveled against audiences that were long marked as not counting by what Wenzel calls “unimagining,” an active practice of containment that consists of “draw[ing] a comforting line of distance and difference around [something], to pull back from the work of engagement and understanding.”54 Holding onto a purist notion of worlding in Cheah’s vein may therefore perpetuate exclusions of certain popular cultural forms and audiences. This danger is avoided if worlding is instead seen, in line with the conceptualizations of Kaiser, Moraru, and Wenzel, as an uncertain and imperfect process that is, as Moraru puts it, “aspirational.”55 Planetary imaginations or world-imaginings from below do not necessarily transform world completely, but “capture a reality, or at least its seeds, and, critical of its world context, paint concurrently a different world in the offing.”56 That profitability and worlding can coexist is also affirmed by Phoebe Macrossan’s discussion of worlding as the strategy characterizing the “star project” of the black singer Beyoncé, which runs through her music, videos, performances, and (social) media presence. Against critics who have, in the manner of Saunders, argued that Beyoncé’s “status as mass commercial product” taints any feminist or anti-racist political meanings her work may generate, Macrossan insists that the “Beyoncé World” so carefully created and maintained by the star, while certainly being geared toward increasing her fame and wealth, also posits alternate realities that feed off and enter into a critical dialogue with the world-as-is, potentially co-creating it otherwise.57 Beyoncé’s 2016 Lemonade video, for example, features an “anachronistic, fantastical and utopian”58 American South free from white slaveowners that, Macrossan emphasizes, is not taken by Beyoncé’s audience—which is “aware of the processes of presentation of Beyoncé World”59—as real, authentic, or uncommodified. Instead, it is recognized as a strategic, aspirational world-imagining that empowers Beyoncé

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and her black fans through “a quite deliberate situating of oneself on the border of different belongings so as the rebuild the world as more open-ended.”60 Here, I want to turn to the second season of Pose as offering a final, particularly layered reflection on the ambivalent worlding force of mass culture. The first season of this successful television series, set in 1987 and 1988, illustrates a subculture’s worldmaking by showing how the queer black and Latinx main characters, violently unimagined by the racist, homophobic, and transphobic mainstream world, have built an alternative underground world constituted of strong, non-heteronormative families. At the same time, it shows the limitations of this worlding in the way the community is being decimated by the AIDS epidemic, which the mainstream world resolutely refuses to address. The second season takes place in 1990–1991 and is framed by the mainstreaming of ball culture through Madonna’s global hit single Vogue. Episode 5 opens with a black female TV reporter standing in front of a line of white, middleclass suburban women at the YMCA proclaiming that “in 1990, all anyone wants is to vogue.” She continues to note that “the once obscure dance moves, popularized by the material girl’s hit, borrowed from New York’s hidden ball culture, are now truly in fashion.” Here, the mass cultural popularization of voguing is framed, from the perspective of the mainstream world, as involving the bringing to light—through an innocuous act of borrowing—of something that was obscure and hidden. Notably, this illumination does not comprise ball culture as a whole, in all its countercultural force, but only the dance moves, which, the reporter stresses, were not “truly” fashionable until adopted by Madonna. Concurrently, the reporter’s reference to Madonna as “the material girl” (after another of her hit songs) by suggesting that a profit motive lies behind the “borrowing” of ball culture identifies voguing’s popularization as a capitalist commodification. In the next scene, Damon, a member of the House of Evangelista, is shown teaching white women to vogue and being scouted by one of them to audition for Madonna’s Blond Ambition world tour. The suggestion here is that the mainstreaming of voguing could be profitable for all, for Madonna, but also for Damon (who is already making money from the vogue lessons) and his friend and former lover Ricky, who is also asked to audition. A discussion between their respective House mothers, Blanca Evangelista and Elektra Wintour, extends this potential profitability to the realm of cultural and symbolic capital, as Blanca proposes that voguing, being performed across the world, will enable everyone in the underground ball scene to finally be seen and acknowledged as part of the mainstream world: Don’t you see that this is not just an opportunity for Damon or Ricky. They standing in for all of us. You may be seven foot tall, hobnobbing with the glitterati but no one really sees you. No one sees any of us. Not until right now, this moment. How are they going to ignore any of us when one of our own is up there dancing in front of thousands of people? You know what, you are one of us and the light that those boys are about to shine our way is going to light you up, too. It is significant that these words are spoken by Blanca, who, throughout the series, appears as the idealistic and caring counterpart to Elektra’s cynicism and narcissistic cruelty. Viewers who have seen Blanca disappointed (though never defeated) before and who, furthermore, know from living in the late 2010s that trans women like Elektra continue to be “lighted up” in predominantly violent and often deadly ways, are unlikely to accept this vision as prophetic. However, that does not mean that they cannot still appreciate it as an aspirational worldimagining from below inspired by Madonna (a star who also pushed against mainstream

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culture’s gender norms), which, even if only temporarily, gave hope to unimagined subjects like Blanca that the world might become more inclusive. The episode continues with Ricky and Damon talking about their future in a way that echoes Blanca’s hopefulness, yet this time the viewer is cued to the precariousness of their hopes by the soundtrack’s playing of the Milli Vanilli song Girl I’m Gonna Miss You. The song’s first line—“[I]t’s a tragedy for me to see the dream is over”—offers a strong hint that neither the boys’ dream of dancing with Madonna nor the rekindling of their relationship will be realized. Furthermore, the scene encourages viewers familiar with the story of Milli Vanilli to connect the fact that, after two global hit records, the faces of the band, Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus, were discovered not to be the actual singers (who were deemed too old and unattractive to be marketable) to Madonna becoming the face of voguing. This connection recodes what the reporter called “borrowing” as a reproachable act of appropriation, in this case of a lower-class queer black subculture by a wealthy cis-gendered woman whose whiteness is highlighted in the title of her world tour. Yet, at the same time, Pose consistently emphasizes that cultural flows are dynamic and complex, and that a particular popular practice can never truly be “owned” by any one community, whether mainstream or not. The series makes clear, for example, how voguing was connected to the mainstream in its very origins as it was the high-fashion magazine Vogue that inspired and gave its name to the dance style. A profitable imagination instrumental in co-creating the world of 1980s American consumer capitalism became a way for those unimagined in that world to become winners and find fame in the ball world; far from representing a full endorsement of consumer capitalism, though, the practice of voguing also undermined it by showing that designer outfits could be cheaply copied and by mopping or stealing garments and accessories, as shown in Pose’s very first episode. In the end, Damon and Ricky are not picked for the Blond Ambition tour—the spot goes to a professional dancer with no experience of ball culture—but the voguing craze does land them a job as dancers on a short-lived revival of the fictional Sound of Gold television show and, in episode 8, enables Damon to join the European tour of Malcolm McLaren, a white English promotor and artist who preceded Madonna’s popularization of voguing with his 1989 hit single Deep in Vogue. Ultimately, then, Pose refrains from endorsing both Blanca’s overly optimistic reading of what the popularization of voguing will do for the ball world and a fully cynical reading in Saunders’s image that would see voguing’s mass dissemination as not actually doing anything in terms of re-creating world. Instead, the show proposes a more nuanced assessment of popular culture’s worlding force. Because of its inevitable participation in profit-driven industries seeking to appropriate subcultural forms and empty them out of anything that would truly threaten the neoliberal order, mass culture may not easily lend itself to the purist and arguably elitist “normative project” of Cheah’s worlding,61 but it is compatible with worlding conceived as a less certain, inherently relational, and ongoing process that involves audiences as active co-creators. Watching Pose in 2020, during the Covid-19 crisis, which resonates and contrasts with the AIDS crisis in complex ways, and as the Black Lives Matter movement resurged and gained global momentum after the tragic police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, added further layers to its work as a world-imagining, underlining how a (popular) cultural object’s worlding force may wane or intensify depending on the world it is encountered in. Here, the writings of Mikhail M. Bakhtin are pertinent: not only was he a strong proponent of the world-(re)making power of popular culture (although admittedly more as folk than mass culture), but in his essay on the chronotope he also stresses that there is never only one world but always a dynamic, dialogic inter (Kaiser would say intra) action between many

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worlds by which all these worlds are continually made or worlded anew: “[T]he work and the world represented in it enter the real world and enrich it, and the real world enters the work and its world, as part of the process of its creation, as well as part of its subsequent life, in a continual renewing of the work through the creative perception of listeners and readers.”62 By replacing “represented” with “worlded” and by reading “work” as comprising not just the literary work but all other art forms and types of popular cultural artifacts, this quote comes to express what I have wanted to say in this chapter about worlding popular culture: that worlding force is not something a particular (popular) artifact either does or does not have, but something that it may have to different degrees and in different directions (toward what Wenzel calls “quarantines of the imagination” and “gentrification of the imagination”63 or away from them, toward the globe or the planet or something else again) depending not only on its content and form but also on whom it is encountered by and in what context.

NOTES 1 David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 4. 2 Birgit Mara Kaiser, “Worlding CompLit: Diffractive Reading with Barad, Glissant and Nancy,” Parallax 20.3 (2014): 276. 3 Theo D’haen, “Worlding World Literature,” Recherches littéraires/Literary Research 32 (Summer 2016): 13. 4 Klavier J. Wang, Hong Kong Popular Culture: Worlding Film, Television, and Pop Music (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). 5 Koichi Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 4, 6. 6 Matthew Allen and Rumi Sakamoto, “Introduction: Inside-out Japan? Popular Culture and Globalization in the Context of Japan,” in Popular Culture, Globalization and Japan, eds. Matthew Allen and Rumi Sakamoto (London: Routledge, 2006), 3. 7 Pheng Cheah, “Worlding Literature: Living with Tiger Spirits,” Diacritics 45.2 (2017): 94. 8 Cheah, “Worlding Literature,” 93. 9 Ibid., 107. 10 Ibid. 11 Kaiser, “Worlding CompLit,” 276. 12 Ibid., 276–7. 13 Ibid., 278; emphasis in text. 14 Ibid., 283. 15 Esther Peeren, Intersubjectivities and Popular Culture: Bakhtin and Beyond (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 20. 16 John Storey, An Introductory Guide to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), 7, 12. 17 John Storey, Inventing Popular Culture: From Folklore to Globalization (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 110. 18 Cheah, “Worlding Literature,” 88. 19 Ibid., 88, 89. 20 Ibid., 89–90. 21 Ibid., 100. 22 Ibid., 100, 101. 23 Ibid., 106. 24 Ibid., 101. 25 Ibid., 95.

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26 Christian Moraru, Reading for the Planet: Toward a Geomethodology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015), 25, 29. 27 Ibid., 29, 73. 28 Ibid., 31. 29 Jennifer Wenzel, The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), 8. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 Cheah, “Worlding Literature,” 90. 33 Wenzel, The Disposition of Nature, 9; emphasis in text. 34 Moraru, Reading for the Planet, 70. 35 Ibid., 74, 69. 36 Alissa Wilkinson, “Black Panther Crushed Overseas Sales Projections: Can We Stop Saying ‘Black Films Don’t Travel’?” Vox (February 20, 2018), https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/2/20/17029156/ black-panther-international-overseas-box-office-black-films-hidden-figures-proud-mary. 37 Robert A. Saunders, “(Profitable) Imaginaries of Black Power: The Popular and Political Geographies of Black Panther,” Political Geography 69 (2019): 143. 38 Wilkinson notes that “thirty-seven percent of the movie’s opening weekend audience in North America was African American, compared to the 15 percent who typically comprise the Marvel movie demographic; Caucasians made up 35 percent of the audience.” Wilkinson, “Black Panther Crushed Overseas Sales Projections.” 39 Renée T. White, “I Dream a World: Black Panther and the Re-Making of Blackness,” New Political Science 40.2 (2018): 424. 40 Ibid., 422. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., 423. White is quoting Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. 43 Ibid., 427. 44 Ibid., 426. 45 Carli Coetzee, “Between the World and Wakanda,” Safundi 20.1 (2019): 22. 46 Saunders, “(Profitable) Imaginaries of Black Power,” 147. 47 Ibid., 144. 48 Ibid., 139. 49 Ibid., 145. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid., 147; emphasis added. 53 Ibid., 140. 54 Wenzel, The Disposition of Nature, 18. 55 Moraru, Reading for the Planet, 59. 56 Ibid. 57 Phoebe Macrossan, “Intimacy, Authenticity and ‘Worlding’ in Beyoncé’s Star Project,” in Popular Music, Stars and Stardom, eds. Stephen Loy, Julie Rickwood, and Samantha Bennett (Acton: Australian National University Press, 2018), 142n9. 58 Ibid.,143. 59 Ibid., 147. 60 Daniel P. S. Goh, ed., Worlding Multiculturalisms: The Politics of Inter-Asian Dwelling (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), 9. 61 Cheah, “Worlding Literature,” 87. 62 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 254. 63 Wenzel, The Disposition of Nature, 9; emphases in text.

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WORKS CITED Allen, Matthew, and Rumi Sakamoto, “Introduction: Inside-out Japan? Popular Culture and Globalization in the Context of Japan.” Eds. Matthew Allen and Rumi Sakamoto. Popular Culture, Globalization and Japan. London: Routledge, 2006. 1–12. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel.” In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. 84–258. Cheah, Pheng. “Worlding Literature: Living with Tiger Spirits.” Diacritics 45.2 (2017): 86–114. Coetzee, Carli. “Between the World and Wakanda.” Safundi 20.1 (2019): 22–5. Coogler, Ryan, dir. Black Panther. DVD. Marvel Studios, 2018. Damrosch, David. What Is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. D’haen, Theo. “Worlding World Literature.” Recherches littéraires/Literary Research 32 (Summer 2016): 7–23. Goh, Daniel P. S., ed. Worlding Multiculturalisms: The Politics of Inter-Asian Dwelling. Abingdon: Routledge, 2015. Iwabuchi, Koichi. Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Kaiser, Birgit Mara. “Worlding CompLit: Diffractive Reading with Barad, Glissant and Nancy.” Parallax 20.3 (2014): 274–87. Macrossan, Phoebe. “Intimacy, Authenticity, and ‘Worlding’ in Beyoncé’s Star Project.” In Popular Music, Stars and Stardom. Eds. Stephen Loy, Julie Rickwood, and Samantha Bennett. Acton: Australian National University Press, 2018. 137–52. Moraru, Christian. Reading for the Planet: Toward a Geomethodology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015. Peeren, Esther. Intersubjectivities and Popular Culture: Bakhtin and Beyond. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008. Pose. FX. Television series. 2018–19. Saunders, Robert A. “(Profitable) Imaginaries of Black Power: The Popular and Political Geographies of Black Panther.” Political Geography 69 (2019): 139–49. Storey, John. An Introductory Guide to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993. Storey, John. Inventing Popular Culture: From Folklore to Globalization. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Wang, Klavier J. Hong Kong Popular Culture: Worlding Film, Television, and Pop Music. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Wenzel, Jennifer. The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. White, Renée T. “I Dream a World: Black Panther and the Re-Making of Blackness.” New Political Science 40.2 (2018): 421–7. Wilkinson, Alissa. “Black Panther Crushed Overseas Sales Projections: Can We Stop Saying ‘Black Films Don’t Travel’?” Vox, February 20, 2018. https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/2/20/17029156/ black-panther-international-overseas-box-office-black-films-hidden-figures-proud-mary.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Worlding Music JOHN MOWITT

At least three articulations of the series “world-music-theory” call for attention when thinking through the problematic of world theory as it might be illuminated through engagement with music. Put differently, if world theory can be usefully taken up in relation to musical practice, then some attention to this series is called for, not simply on empirical grounds, but as the conceptual means by which to tease out aspects of the musical, even sonic properties of the encounter between world and theory. If, as Jean-Luc Nancy has argued, philosophy cannot listen (entendre), then can theory?1 Does either world or music decisively sound in theory? As will become louder, more blatant in what follows, these questions and others of their ilk draw attention to a generative ambiguity animating them. Phrased contrastively: how are we to think and thus articulate the relation between the music of the world and the world of music, both in the sense of the musical profession, but also, and more urgently, in the sense of the concept of the world put in play through music, especially perhaps so-called world music. Crucial to this last is the vexed concept of Stimmung (attunement), as its resonances have been traced both by Leo Spitzer and, more recently, by David Wellbery.2 As in the case of Pascale Casanova’s “world republic of letters,” where “world” (contra Goethe) is insistently distinguished from the geopolitics of nationalism, the endeavor to theorize the worlding of music confronts immediately the problem of the world as such. Can it be theorized musically, and if so, where, as it were, does it end up?3 An obvious but not therefore irrelevant articulation of the series “world-music-theory” exhibits a distinct disciplinary profile. The scholar and musician Robert E. Brown is widely credited with having confected the concept of “world music.” More a category than a proper concept, “world music” was designed to produce an object for the emergent academic field of musical ethnography. The world in question would appear to be the world Lévi-Strauss’s English translator captured in the expression, “world on the wane” (Tristes Tropiques). This is a world that can come to an end.4 In 1953, just a year after the debut of Cage’s “4′33″,” Brown founds the journal of the Society of Ethnomusicology. In its first issue, one finds the following paragraph under the recurrent section, “Recordings.” James van Horn calls attention to the problem of recording the Snoqualmie Indians before their tribal group disappears. He says that Jerry Kanim, 78, chief of the Snoqualmie, is willing to sing traditional songs at his home in Carnation, Washington, U.S.A. and that Kanim is the last qualified person to do so.5 One can imagine here, albeit cynically, Alan Lomax and perhaps Zora Neale Hurston racing around the American South in a retrofitted Model T Ford saving the world of folk. Perhaps every archive emits a distinct, if faint, apocalyptic tone.6 Although he did not always link “the

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world” to his critique of “Orientalism,” Edward Said’s insistence on culture’s imbrication in the uneven geopolitics of empire urges us to recognize in the “world” of ethnomusicology precisely musical traditions quickly being decimated by modernization as mobilized by the West against the rest. The waning of the world was being simultaneously facilitated and redeemed by what Evan Eisenberg called the “recording angel” giving a new, even startling, sense to the wax and wane binary. It will hardly come as a surprise that “world music” has received considerable scholarly attention. One thinks here of Timothy Taylor’s Music in the World, but even more pertinently of Steve Feld’s “A Sweet Lullaby for World Music.” Taylor, prolific and impassioned though he is, never quite manages to invert his title and explore the “world in music,” preferring instead to explore the logic of branding, or perhaps genre-fication, by which “world” simply means global capital. Of course, there is much to be said for this line of argument, but if stated too baldly, Taylor’s thesis achieves in writing the totalization that capital is to be confronted and condemned for seeking to achieve. Is it necessary, when agreeing that “world music” is indeed a brand, to concede that the world is too? What sort of brand, and with what implications for the theoretical practices that mobilize it? When the world wanes, is it simply because it has reached the end of its shelf life? Taylor, whose collection dates from just two years ago, is aware of Feld’s earlier intervention, and while he mimics in certain respects Feld’s critique of “diversity” (it too is a branding concept), he lets slip precisely those aspects of Feld’s analysis that might usefully separate world and global capital. To be fair, the arc of Feld’s essay—it builds to a fraught examination of copyright abuse perpetrated by the Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek and the Green Forest duo—the arc invites readers to skim its more theoretically provocative formulations, but they are there to be read, to be listened to, as I argue in Offering Theory. For example: Whatever the success of these aims [the forging of the term “ethnomusicology”], the terminological dualism that distinguished world music from music helped reproduce a tense division in the academy, where musics understood as non-Western or ethnically other continued to be routinely partitioned from those of the West. The binary reproduced by the world music concept thus participated in reinscribing the separation of musicology, constructed as the historical and analytical study of Western European art musics, from ethnomusicology, constructed by default as the cultural and contextual study of musics of non-Europeans, European peasants, and marginalized ethnic or racial minorities. The relationship of the colonizing and colonized thus remained generally intact in distinguishing music from world music.7 While it would be misleading to suggest that Feld has no use for the concept of global capital, what is emphasized here is an insight more typically attributed to postcolonial theorists, namely, that the world is at odds with itself. The “world” of world music is thus riven by an encounter with otherness that simultaneously provokes and solicits a Eurocentric conception of a world whose unity is only thinkable through the epistemological options this conception authorizes. Although it would take us far afield, at stake here is the set of issues that, during the era of anticolonial struggles, often led nonwhite partisans of the Left to hesitate before aligning with putative comrades monomaniacally absorbed in the struggle against capital. One might think here of Aimé Césaire’s fancy footwork in the justly celebrated Discourse on Colonialism.8 Be that as it may, Feld elaborates a further distinction within world music

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between anxiety and celebration, urging us to consider how our listening might respond to the possible worlds circulating in world music and thus tying the human sensorium to the worlds of the senses. Phrased in the genre of summation, thinking through the concept of “world music” thus puts directly in play the problem of how we might theorize what the world can be if its waning is indexed to practices, at once ethnographic and musicological, seeking to capitalize on its survival? A second essential articulation of the “music-world-theory” series follows directly from my reference to Eurocentrism and its muted invocation of Said’s concept of “worldliness,” a property he attributed to texts that prevented them from meaning whatever elite Western theorists—himself included—said they meant. Introduced already in Beginnings, folded haphazardly within “worldliness” was a set of theoretical assumptions that Said, despite his awareness of Heidegger, never bothered to bring into contact with the distinction between “world” and “earth” in the latter’s 1935 lecture, “The Origin of the Work of Art.” What this cost Said might be broadly construed as a “reduction” of the work of art, an effect to be regretted because it forestalled a geopolitical reflection on the very motif of “origin,” a reflection it required Jacques Derrida to work out. Setting aside the question of “the Turn” (whether and when it took place), “The Origin of the Work of Art” dates from the mid-thirties and precedes “The Age of the World Picture (Weltbild)” by a few years. Both fall in the wake of Heidegger’s fateful affiliation with the National Socialist Party, an affiliation whose despicable anti-Semitic motivations the recently published Schwarze Hefte (black notebooks) has brought out. Although Heidegger’s invocation of “world Judaism” was unknown to him, it is this history that ultimately turned Herbert Marcuse against Heidegger who, as for so many others (one thinks here of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty), embodied the hope of a philosophy of the concrete—a philosophy immediately engaged with “the world.” What world was this? Marcuse ultimately decided that this world was an enticing version of the otherwise uninteresting philosophical world of abstraction, but before we accept the implicit hypothesis that the world’s abstractness was a sure sign of its anti-Semitic conceptualization (what then is the “world” of “Weltjudentum”?), let us ask what is to be gleaned from Heidegger’s various characterizations of it, especially as these might bear generatively on the phenomenon of “worlding.” Readers of “The Origin of the Work of Art” know that it turns decisively toward poetry as the model of the “work of art.” In this, it restates the conclusions of Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics, but without his insistence on the teleology of form. Instead, Heidegger approaches the matter ontologically, putting great stress on the structure of poetry’s relation to its conditions of possibility, and it is precisely here that he introduces the distinction between “earth” and “world.” As I am interested in what happens to “world” in such a distinction, the text merits direct citation from the recent Young translation: World is not a mere collection of things—countable and uncountable, known and unknown—that are present at hand. Neither is a world a merely imaginary framework added by our representation to the sum of things that are present. World worlds, and is more fully in being than all those tangible and perceptible things in the midst of which we take ourselves to be at home. World is never an object that stands before us and can be looked at.9 By contrast, Heidegger says the following about “earth” (also often without either definite or indefinite article).

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Earth is the coming-forth-concealing … Earth is that which cannot be forced, that which is effortless and untiring. On and in the earth, historical man founds his dwelling in the world. In setting up a world, the work [of art] sets forth the earth. “Setting forth … ” is to be thought, here, in the strict sense of the word. The work moves the earth into the open of a world and holds it there. The work lets the earth be an earth.10 Heidegger has turned to such a distinction in order to deliver on his insistence that while a work of art is a thing, it is not simply one. Pressing down hard on the distinction between “setting up” and “setting forth,” Heidegger presents the work as the sort of thing that arises at the point of articulation between the world it sets up, and the earth it sets forth. More specifically, he attempts to grasp the truth of the work—its distinctive mode of disclosure—by interpreting this hinge under the sign of strife, die Streit, a conflict that arises as the work sets up and sets forth world and earth. Crucial here is the ontological difference between the two, suggesting that world worlds as it resists being earth and does so specifically in a work of art. Despite the special status accorded to poetry in this lecture (it is characteristic of Heidegger’s thought as a whole), if we note that Heidegger repeatedly, and thus insistently, includes tones and the “ringing of sounds” among those things that in being works are not things, we are in a position to consider that music too “worlds” in animating the strife between world and earth. Phrased as a formula: world music worlds. Are these “worlds” the same or even similar? We will return to earth. This nuances our series “world-music-theory” in a decisive way, but a way whose formulation is enabled by turning to an earlier discussion of world in Heidegger, specifically, his lengthy meditation on the “worldhood (Weltlichkeit, so ‘worldliness’) of the world” in Being and Time. This transpires in chapter 3 of Part One, and it is motivated by Heidegger’s interpretation of the status of being-in-the-world as concerns human being-there, Dasein. Those who have combed over these difficult passages will have noted that both “earth” and “work” are largely absent from them. “Things” remain prominent, but they are divided between the things of Nature and things of Value, the latter coming close to what Heidegger will later argue about works. As a consequence, the temptation is strong to read “earth” beneath or behind Nature, but this would be misleading. By the same token, things of Value are divided between objects of concern, or what he calls “equipment,” things simply at hand, and other things, things present to hand. Despite these myriad and significant differences, when Heidegger lists the senses of “world” that matter to him (see paragraphs 65–66), it is clear that if an expression like “worldhood” is not merely extravagant, it is because it speaks to the status of the world as part of the difficult structure of Dasein, a designation for the fact that the knowing of reality ontologically presupposes an exposure to and encounter with what is in Dasein that is more than Dasein. The world is thus not in any ordinary sense “out there.” It is a designation for what in Dasein obstructs its inwardness, its reduction to proprioceptive thought. Heidegger’s repudiation of Descartes and the ontological contrast between res cogitans and res extensa is brutal and unsparing. Perhaps most inadequate about this characterization of Heidegger’s position is not primarily its cursory character (it is certainly that), but the fact that it does not yet address in any direct way music. Matters are not made any easier by the fact that “works” and explicitly “the work of art” are left to the side in Being and Time. Matters are, however, made more interesting. Specifically, what happens to music is that it is deftly transposed from a thing composed of “ringing sounds,” or “tones,” to what is translated as “mood,” “Being-attuned” or, in German, Gestimmtsein. In the footnote that accompanies the introduction of this term

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in the text, Macquarrie and Robinson remind readers that its philological heritage is ancient, deriving initially from Pythagoras and bearing throughout its subsequent history a decisive accord with sound and the logic of attunement, or what Leo Spitzer was simply to dub, “world harmony.” But in what precise way does this make the articulation of world and music more interesting? To address this, I resume the reading of Being and Time, however cursory. David Wellbery’s perfunctory discussion of Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption may be unforgivable, but I agree with him when he underscores the importance of the discussion of Stimmung in Being and Time that unfolds in section 29, “Being There as State-of-Mind (Befindlichkeit),” where one reads: States-of-mind are so far from being reflected upon, that precisely what they do is to assail Dasein in its unreflective devotion to the “world” with which it is concerned and on which it expends itself. A mood assails us. It comes neither from “outside” nor from “inside,” but arises out of Being-in-the-world as a way of such Being. But with the negative distinction between state-of-mind and the reflective apprehending of something “within,” we have thus reached a positive insight into their [moods] character as disclosure. The mood has already disclosed, in every case, Being-in-the-world as a whole, and makes it possible first of all to direct oneself toward something.11 Here, Heidegger rather dramatically displaces the Kantian evocation of “attunement” as the means by which to conceive the entering into harmony, or concord, of human faculties, say those of the imagination and understanding when faced with a materialization of nonpurposive purpose. He does so by calling out its relation to the event of disclosure, the event whereby Dasein’s encounter with world takes place within Being-attuned (Gestimmtsein). Put differently, only through Being-attuned can Dasein engage its “there,” its sense of being in place, directed toward something other than itself. Although provocative, Heidegger’s subsequent discussion of anxiety (Angst) as State-of-Mind, a theme implicitly retrieved by Feld, heads away from what makes this discussion relevant to the problematic of “world music,” a development readily avoided by reemphasizing the Pythagorean resonance of attunement. Buzzing within this resonance is the proposition that the world—not earth, but world— is indeed “on a string.” The Arlen/Koehler standard ties this string to the State-of-Mind called “love,” narrowing the philosophical insight here to the unfathomable depth of a Coke commercial, but if approached as an evocation of the monochord, Pythagoras’s power point avant l’être, then we face different music.12 We face a music that in disclosing under which conditions the world waxes and wanes, shifts from music, to sound, to what Wolfgang Ernst has called “sonicity,” that is, the cinematic buzz that music(s)—from hip-hop, to salsa, to zydeco, to rai and beyond—let ring without mastering. Not then music in or of the world, but world as effect of musicking, to invoke Chris Small’s still reverberant neologism.13 To be clear, while this displacement might suggest that “worldliness” and “world” are isotropes, mere reality effects, the immanence Pythagoras seeks in the arithmetic of vibration and frequency evokes a materialism of the precise sort that attracted the young Marx to Epicurean contingency. And theory? Reading on in Being and Time we find Heidegger wrestling with this very angel. Veteran readers will know that Heidegger’s ready recourse to the rhetoric of visualism is motivated by an early, and now tired, emphasis on the tie between theorīa and spectacle, a pattern that explains his proposition that while theory “dims down” the world, it can

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never—even in its purest state—leave all moods, all instances of Being-attuned behind. What appears when theory dims down the world is what is present at hand.14 However, being attuned to this world requires that theory tarries in tranquility (Ruhe, so also silence, stillness) alongside it. To nuance “tranquility” Heidegger recycles two Aristotelian terms (rastone, comfort and diagoge, recreation), an approach that evokes while nuancing Nancy’s proposition that philosophy cannot listen. The issue is about noise, and Heidegger here proposes that theory can indeed listen, but only in the absence of din. Such formulations would resound, especially today, as mere clichés if not for the fact that, tranquility as a modality of attunement, plunges theory itself into a soundscape of stillness. Theory thus participates in Dasein’s mode of disclosure where the latter is exposed to the structure of its worlding. Matters are vexed here because Heidegger does not settle, much less address, the question of whether Befindlichkeit is audible. It is not even clear what is to be seen in and as tranquility. Just the same, as with world music, world theory, a theory of the world, is ontologically conditioned in this account by that iteration of sonicity we call music, a situation that has motivated Ernst to subsume sound studies within an expanded, postcritical musicology. Here Ernst enters into an implicit dialogue with Larry Kramer’s recent Hum of the World, one whose details warrant brief elaboration if for no other reason than the fact that Kramer is explicitly thinking about “the world” of sound. In 2016, Ernst gave the keynote address at the “Sound Art Matters” event in Aarhus, Denmark. Titled “Listening to Sonic Expressions with Media Archaeological Ears,” this talk,  after setting  in motion several doctrinal tenets of media archaeological (it is method, not  discourse; it is concerned with deep, heterogeneous temporalities, not origins, etc.), meandered around to a set of propositions about sound studies. Indeed, it was here that Ernst mobilized the contrast between sound and sonicity. To put the polemical point crudely, sound studies has remained fixated on sound and resisted sonicity, that is, the enabling processual phenomena out of which sound emerges. Pressured during the Q&A to develop this critique, Ernst asserted that musicology was the oldest field within which the temporality of process mattered and that for this reason sound studies ought to acknowledge this debt, overcome its nostalgia for the pre-digital, and welcome its disciplinary subsumption within musicology. A version of this conclusion was stated in the question from the floor, and Ernst began his response by noting that “he could not have said it better myself.” Since both interlocutors were more interested in the disciplinary angle, nothing more was said about musicology, leaving everyone within range to wonder whether “attention to processuality” covered it, as it were. “Sonicity,” above and beyond its contrast with sound, assumed a certain metonymic function in Ernst’s remarks, indexing a variety of instances where he would invoke the depth of algorithmic coding as what escaped researchers unwilling, or unprepared (no training in computing), to attend to it. Despite his titular evocation of the “ears,” Ernst did not dwell on the matter of human perception or what Larry Kramer in The Hum of the World calls the tension between the audible and the audiable. Internationally recognized as a leading critical musicologist, Kramer’s interest in the “hum” would presumably be of keen interest to someone advocating for the subsumption of sound studies within musicology, but apart from the straightforward biographical matter of acquaintance or textual familiarity (they seem unaware of each other), other, more difficult matters seem to interfere. Kramer does even write, early in his study: “Music is one of the foundations of hearing,”15 or, even more provocatively: “No sound without music.”16 Both are formulations that might suggest Ernst and Kramer are on the proverbial same page—that they agree about the foundational status of music in the study of sound. They are not.

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Having underscored the matter of the “ear” in Ernst, it is important now to stress that “sonicity” does not square with what Kramer is scanning for in his neologism of “the audiable,” even though, clearly, he wants to set it off against the audible. Regarding the former, Kramer writes: “[T]he audiable is the material promise of sound … The audiable is the precursor of sound to come, yet it is also experienced through hearing, as if auditory sensation had a future tense. The audiable is the hum of the world.” … The audiable is the undertone of auditory culture.17 What emerges here is Kramer’s interest in potentiality, one might say, the virtuality of sound. While the audiable is not yet audible, it can be listened for (I note that Kramer uses the verbs, “to hear” and “to listen” interchangeably) and, as his declarative sentences announce (the audiable is … ), made present to human perception. The becoming of this sonorous present, its potentiality, is a source of pleasure and thus, ultimately, music (see his “reflection” titled “No Sound Without Music” in the same volume). By contrast, “sonicity” eludes both audibility and audiability. It makes no essential reference to the human. Perhaps this is also why Ernst shows little interest in a term that repeats in Kramer’s study: world. The audiable is the hum of the world, implying—one might think—that the book might also have simply been titled “The Audiable.” But what of this world in Kramer? Although he calls out Heidegger by name,18 invokes both tone and attunement,19 and associates the ghostly presence of the audiable with the Pythagorean monochord,20 he does not settle down, even when laying out his “Philosophy of Listening,” to tell us what happens to world when it becomes hum. He does insist that “[h]earing is the sense by which the world permeates the human,”21 and later that “[t]he pleasure consummated in music is the sound that attaches us to the heard world,”22 but without noting that attachment and permeation are not only different, but that they call up rather different worlds, worlds whose collision ought to matter more than it does. Risked here is a repetition of the charge made against Heidegger, namely that world, like poetry for Heidegger, is just a metaphor in Kramer. What it is a metaphor of emerges sharply in the contrast with Ernst. It is a metaphor of the human, the bearer of the ears that, in the end, the media archaeologist invokes only to set aside. The music that attaches us to the heard world invokes a world in which Ernst’s musicology is uninterested. That world is one whose time has come and gone. And what then of the earth? As noted, this concept is left largely in shadow in Heidegger’s Being and Time. It encroaches through Umwelt or “environment,” but surely the more interesting, if not strictly Heideggerian engagement with Earth and sound, is the one to be found in Douglas Kahn’s Earth Sound, Earth Signal. Published in 2013, this text is a series of soundings, each of which examines, as the text’s subtitle—“energies and earth magnitude”— implies, instances of so-called natural radio. Starting with Edison and Watson, Kahn teases out the aesthetic implications of the electromagnetic bleed that in haunting point-to-point audio transmission situates what Cage once called the “future of music,” not in an inaccessible silence, but in, among other things, “whistlers,” that is, the massive electromagnetic discharges played, literally produced, by the Earth. In thus reading Earth sounds as signals, Kahn regrounds the concept of the Aeolian (discussed at length in Kramer) in the non-hieratic “music of the sphere,” tracing how the significance of this gesture snaps, crackles, and pops within the work of everyone from Alvin Lucier to Pauline Oliveros. Because his angle is routinely more ethnographic, more empirical, Kahn also values unmediated, natural, iterations of these proto-musical phenomena missing the theoretically provocative tension between Earth and world to be found in Heidegger. To be sure, his discussion obliges us to hesitate before Spitzer’s rendering of Stimmung as “world harmony,” but are Earth signals merely to be

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understood as the more originary dissonance of an Earth on the wane?23 If Being-attuned is where world and something like music can no longer be differentiated, how are we to approach what the Earth is performing? Is it attuning us to what never circulates in or as “world music.” If, as Nancy argues, philosophy cannot listen, perhaps even such questions must remain unheard of. There is more here than Horatio’s dilemma. This is Said’s and Casanova’s dilemma as well. Where in the world is “worlding” taking place, if not precisely in those mediations that diagram the violent unevenness of a waning that has reached terrestrial proportions? Ernst may be right, but for the wrong reasons. Musicology may indeed have an unanticipated, unheard (of) role to play in the current conjuncture, but not simply because it keeps time. More urgently, in whatever form it is assuming as it metabolizes the “ethno-” prefix, musicology compels us to take seriously the notion that no theoretically informed, social reading of the present is possible without taking up and taking in the worlds of music.

NOTES 1 Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 1. 2 Leo Spitzer, Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony: Prolegomena to an Interpretation of the Word “Stimmung,” ed. Anna Granville Hatcher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963); David Wellbery, “Stimmung,” trans. Rebecca Pohl, New Formations 93.2 (2017): 6–45. 3 The current preoccupation with the Anthropocene as a mot d’art in the climate change/global warming debate has tended to cast the “world literature” quarrel of barely more than a decade ago in shade. The tension between earth and world is one about which I will have more to say, but here it feels important to stress that Casanova’s intellectual and professional debt to Pierre Bourdieu obliged her to foreground the intellectual, not to say academic, aspect of the world of world literature. Nevertheless, her intervention (along with those of others) put the matter of the world and its relation to the work of art (in her case, “the republic of letters”) in play with a force that subsequent discussions of the world, including my own, cannot responsibly avoid. The possible worlds animated here are ones so-called ethnomusicology does not consistently entertain. Similarly, the status of Bourdieu’s sociological innovations, as an iteration of theory, invites attention. If “literary space” (as invoked by Casanova) globally positioned around Paris is where the world arises in literature, is this a “theory effect” of a certain kind of aggressively post-vulgar sociology of culture? To be frank, I am less interested in the heated exchanges that greeted and sustained her intervention than I am in the conceptual prototype it embodied. 4 Formulated thus, one is reminded of Mark Fisher’s recycling of Fredric Jameson’s aperçu: it is clearly easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. Like Fisher, I take this as a provocation. If the lost world of the “sad tropics” marks a limit of capitalism (a “before” if not precisely an “after”), then does this world as a duration not potentially fire an imagination struggling to get ahead of the totalization capitalism otherwise seems to have achieved? Although rhetorical in many ways, this question urges that we consider what potential world brings to theory as a name for its limits. 5 Ethnomusicology, “Recordings,” 1.1 (December 1953), 10. 6 In the liner notes that accompany the Rounder Records pressing of The Alan Lomax Collection Sampler, the “inexpert” Brian Eno invites readers to see Lomax as perhaps the founder of “world music.” Of course, Alan was following in his father’s footsteps, so the attribution may be a stretch, but if Brown at Wesleyan was indeed responding to something in confecting “world music,” it was surely indexed to the wall of sound, the archive that the Lomaxes (and others—one thinks here of Hugh Tracey in South Africa) plucked from the abyss. Regardless of attribution, there is a logic of recording, a repeating that displaces, insistently manifest in the world of ethnomusicology. Carl Sagan, who brought Lomax in as a consultant for the Golden Record project with Voyagers I and

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II, glimpsed this displacement from the other end, that is, at the point where world and interstellar space touched. See his Murmurs of the Earth. 7 Steven Feld, “A Sweet Lullaby for World Music,” Public Culture 12.1 (Winter 2000): 147. 8 Aimé Césaire, The Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Robin D. G. Kelly (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000). 9 Martin Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 23. 10 Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, 24. 11 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 175–6. 12 The sixth-century BC Greek polymath and cult leader Pythagoras has surged back into the foreground of Sound Studies as a result of Pierre Schaeffer’s rehabilitation of the former’s notion of the “acousmatic” (also developed to powerful effect by Michel Chion in Cinema Studies). Although stress is typically placed on the structure of the acousmatic (a sound whose source falls outside the visual field), it is also relevant that this structure is derived from the choreography of pedagogy. It is in such a context that the monochord also belongs. It is the single-stringed instrument that demonstrates both rationally and affectively the logic of temperament. Pythagorean tuning derives from it. In the early seventeenth century, the English natural philosopher Robert Fludd remediated the monochord turning it into a diagram of the musical rationality of the Ptolemaic universe, tracing, as it were, the icon of Stimmung as “world harmony.” This diagram graces R. Murray Schafer’s Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World from 1977 and has insistently pulsed into Sound Studies since. As Fludd’s invocation of Ptolemy will remind us, the world rationalized by the monochord is a world whose waning indexes a “modernity” that stretches from astronomy to psychoanalysis. This is not irrelevant to the “world-theory-music” series. 13 In 1998, the New Zealand musicologist Christopher Small brought out Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. It was an effort, wisely half-hearted, to render systematic the senses of “musicking,” a term he had introduced in his brilliant study of diasporic popular musics, Music of a Common Tongue, from 1987. If it matters yet again, it is because “musicking” designates the fact that music is not an object. It is an event, a performance, and one that requires “two to tango.” For Small, musical performance includes the activity—whether dancing or fidgeting—of listening. My proposition here is that “worlding” is also part of what music is effecting. As Small’s orientation was more sociological, he would have resisted the more philosophical resonances of such a proposition. 14 Heidegger, Being and Time, 177. 15 Larry Kramer, The Hum of the World: A Philosophy of Listening (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), 17. 16 Kramer, The Hum of the World, 50. 17 Ibid., 4–5. 18 Ibid., 35. 19 Ibid., 8. 20 Ibid., 60. 21 Ibid., 36. 22 Ibid., 51. 23 In his reflection titled “Worldly Dissonance,” Kramer, commenting on Kaja Silverman’s proposition that the world wants us to see its beauty, draws attention to her implicit assumption that the world is silent. Against this, he develops, through a pass over Edvard Munch’s “Scream” (or is it the “scream of nature,” or simply, “shriek”?), the idea that dissonant images are far more readily received than dissonant sounds. Neither “dissonance” (and he is well aware of Theodor Adorno’s treatment) nor “world” is attuned to the philosophical challenge of dissonant Stimmung. Heidegger’s anxiety is scanning for its musical articulation.

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WORKS CITED Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Trans. Malcolm DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Césaire, Aimé. The Discourse on Colonialism. Trans. Robin D. G. Kelly. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000. Ernst, Wolfgang. “Listening to Sonic Expressions with Media Archaeological Ears.” Keynote address at Sound Art Matters. University of Aarhus, Denmark. 2016. [unpublished] Ethnomusicology. “Recordings.” 1.1 (December 1953): 10. Feld, Steven. “A Sweet Lullaby for World Music.” Public Culture 12.1 (Winter 2000): 145–71. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. Heidegger, Martin. Off the Beaten Track. Ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Kahn, Douglas. Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013. Kramer, Lawrence. The Hum of the World: A Philosophy of Listening. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. World on the Wane. Trans. Doreen and John Weightman. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Listening. Trans. Charlotte Mandell. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Sagan, Carl (et al.). Murmurs of the Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record. New York: Random House, 1978. Said, Edward. The World, the Text, the Critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983. Small, Christopher. Music of the Common Tongue: Celebration and Survival in Afro-American Music. London: Calder Books, 1987. Spitzer, Leo. Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony: Prolegomena to an Interpretation of the Word “Stimmung.” Ed. Anna Granville Hatcher. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963. Taylor, Timothy. Music in the World: Selected Essays. Chicago: University of California Press, 2017. Wellbery, David. “Stimmung.” Trans. Rebecca Pohl. New Formations 93.2 (2017): 6–45.

CHAPTER NINE

Worlding Cinema ALEX TAEK-GWANG LEE

CINEMA AND THE WORLD When the Korean film Parasite won the Oscar Award and became the first non-Englishlanguage film to take the top prize, I received many messages of celebration from my Asian friends, which is strange because I am not a person with any connection to the film. It seems that the only reason for the praise I received is that Parasite is a “Korean” film and I am Korean. My friends in Asia recognized my nationality and found out the connection between the film and me. However, there arises a problem: if Parasite is a typical Korean film, it will fail to attain its present global reputation. A “Korean” film would aim at the “Korean” reception and adopt the local cultural logic unfamiliar to the global audiences. Why did this “connection” manifest with the success of Parasite? Alain Badiou’s comments on cinema begin to answer this question. Badiou argues that as a “mass art,” cinema has to be seen and loved by “millions of people from every social group at the very time they were created.”1 In this sense, “[t]he character of Charlie, perfectly situated in a recognizable context and filmed from close up and frontally, is no less a representative of generic ‘popular’ humanity for an African, a Japanese, or an Eskimo.”2 For Badiou, further, cinema is a “democratic” genre integrating paradoxical relationships like philosophy, because cinema as “mass art” merges two terms: “mass,” a political category, and “art,” an aristocratic category. Here, Badiou correctly points out the political meaning of cinema as a popular genre but does not get further into the denotation of “generic ‘popular’ humanity.” In Badiou’s concept, generic humanity means “that which provides support to the generic or truth procedures” in the moment of an event.3 However, this “humanity” does not signify any universal human essence, but rather the equal possibility of all human individuals, which is related to the truth of the event, not belonging to any specific individuality. This concept is the philosophical torsion of Hegel’s arguments on humanity as a whole. For Hegel, humanity functions as the ground of subtraction by which any concrete individual comes to exist. The individuals are beings subtracted from the “Idea of Humanity” as a whole through temporality; thus, each individual implicitly possesses the “Idea.” The “Idea of Humanity” provides each person with the essence of life. In this sense, Hegel argues that “man is free by nature … according to the Idea of Humanity,” and he can be free only by virtue of his destiny.4 Badiou and Hegel part company in their discussions of humanity, especially on the notion of freedom. Badiou does not accept Hegel’s conceptualization of freedom as a human essence. Hegel’s concept of essential freedom has nothing to do with the experience of an event. In Hegel’s sense, freedom is predetermined for human destiny. Badiou rejects any understanding of humanity without the radical split between individual and subject. The

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individual, after the experience of an event, that is, the subject, can no longer be the one that he or she was before. This separation marks the moment of the truth, implicitly possessing generic humanity. Therefore, Badiou’s grasp of cinema as “mass art” seems to presuppose that, as a form of art, it must imply the fidelity toward the truth of an event within its logic. As he states, cinema as “mass art” is supposed to contain both political truth and poetical truth. Two truths could come to exist by their “compossibility,” even though the two categories are paradoxical. This paradox within the formal logic of truth forges the “connections” between different categories. These estranged connections, corresponding to the logic of cinema corresponding to “generic humanity,” led my Asian friends to celebrate the extraordinary achievement of Parasite. They identify cinematic popularity with my nationality, projecting the “Idea of Humanity” beyond a nation-state called the Republic of Korea. In other words, the repercussions of Parasite around Asian people are the symptomatic consequence of postwar nationalism. From this perspective, I would say, Deleuze’s periodization of postwar cinema seems to serve as a supplement to Badiou’s arguments. As is  well known,  Deleuze states that cinema is fundamentally transformed after the Second World War. In postwar cinema, the subordination of time to movement, which echoes the philosophy of action like liberalism and dialectical materialism, is inverted, and cinema creates multiple time-images.5 The time-image affords a new type of thought, which calls into question the philosophy of action underpinning the movement-image: If the major break comes at the end of the war, with neorealism, it’s precisely because neorealism registers the collapse of sensory-motor schemes: characters no longer “know” how to react to situations that are beyond them, too awful, or too beautiful, or insoluble … So a new type of character appears. But, more important, the possibility appears of temporalizing the cinematic image: pure time, a little bit of time in its pure form, rather than motion.6 What is at stake here is not the change of cinematography, but instead the “collapse of sensory-motor schemes” in cinematic realism. Deleuze points out that cinema is liberated to multiplicity as such, creating reality, not representing reality. His concept of time-image is parallel to the concept of minor literature, that is, the “minor” use of literature by escaping from the ruling norms of language. As Deleuze acknowledges, his two books about cinema are “the” history of cinema from the perspective of natural history. What then is this natural history of cinema? Deleuze states that his history of cinema “aims to classify the types of images and the corresponding signs, as one classifies animals.”7 For him, the main genres tell us nothing about the history of cinema, but about only images with signs. The classification of cinema is possible because the cinema field is built on the movement-image corresponding to internal signs. Montage is a cinematic technique to bring different images together. However, there takes place cinematic revolution after the Second World War. Cinema starts to deal with “pure time,” the temporalization of the cinematic image. “Pure time” builds on the lines of flight, the future, in the logic of cinema. “Pure time” is the temporality of immanence in resisting the ossification of life, not subordinated to any force. In this sense, the time-image is the “transcendental exercise” of cinematography, the third world zones of cinematic images. The image is not the representation of reality, but the creation of temporality, that is, the time of future, which has never been. Cinema is no longer trapped in action or the axiomatics of movement.

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THE QUESTION CONCERNING ASIAN CINEMA The cinematography of “pure time” means that everything can be cinema. After the Second World War, cinema is freed from spatio-temporality and is differentiated from the classical sense of cinema. Cinema is any possibility of the future, not stuck to the representation of the established past and present. This idea leads us to rethink the meaning of Parasite’s success beyond the dialectic between the nation-state and generic humanity. The transformation of cinema happened not only in Europe but also in non-Europe. Deleuze’s understanding of postwar cinema resonates these changes across the world. For Deleuze, the revolutionary aspects of cinema, forging strange connections or combinations between different images, are liberated as minor or intense use of cinematography in the sense of the third world. In this sense, the notion of “world cinema,” analogous to Goethe’s concept of “world literature,” Weltliteratur, would be applicable to postwar cinema. The term “world cinema” would be interchangeable with the term “foreign cinema.” World cinema or foreign cinema presupposes the dialectical relationship between nationalism and internationalism. Nationalism implicitly possesses a passion for international recognition and vice versa. A nation-state is the material foundation of nationalism as well as internationalism, providing the people with authenticity. The rise of world cinema is closely related to the desire for national recognition. Charles Taylor points out the ideological interaction between authenticity and nationalism as follows: Being true to myself means being true to my own originality, which is something only I can articulate and discover. In articulating it, I am also defining myself. I am realizing a potentiality that is properly my own. This is the background understanding to the modern ideal of authenticity, and to the goals of self-fulfillment and self-realization in which the ideal is usually couched … Just like individuals, a Volk should be true to itself, that is, its own culture. Germans shouldn’t try to be derivative and (inevitably) second-rate Frenchmen, as Frederick the Great’s patronage seemed to be encouraging them to do. The Slavic peoples had to find their own path. And European colonialism ought to be rolled back to give the peoples of what we now call the Third World their chance to be themselves unimpeded. We can recognize here the seminal idea of modern nationalism, in both benign and malignant forms.8 Back to the Korean film Parasite, here is where a disturbing truth lingers in the impetus behind its acclaim at the 2020 Oscars. No doubt, the internationally recognized film contributes to helping “Koreans” and “Asians” claim rights to their culture. World or foreign cinema serves as a channel of both national recognition and global reputation. However, many possibilities of world cinema also pave the way toward the revolutionary use of cinematography beyond the national identity of postwar cinema. Badiou suggests that cinema is the image of semblance, and then many discussions of Parasite denote that the film is the representation corresponding to the reality of Korean society. To some point, the cinematic images would be a mirror image to the actuality of Korean neoliberalism. However, the film does not adapt ethical figures for moral mythology but instead adopts meta-ethical thinking and as such puts in question the condition of moral decision-making. If seeing Bong’s filmography, it would not be difficult to know that the director of Parasite is not interested in producing the “great figures of humanity.” Therefore, the global success of Parasite does not rest on the inner logic of the film. It is the postwar

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world system of international film awards, such as the Cannes Film Festival and the Oscar Academy Awards, which has let the film attract widespread attention. The implication of Asian cinema, if any, would come along with this strange “connection” between cinematography and institutional mechanism. As Deleuze clarifies, a “whole pedagogy” of cinema reads the visual and hears the speechact in a new way.9 In this sense, Asian cinema as “mass art” requires us to approach world or foreign cinema from a different perspective. Here, Asian cinema’s teaching seems to repeat Godardian pedagogy: “We need an ethic or a faith, which makes fools laugh; it is not a need to believe in something else, but a need to believe in this world, of which fools are a part.”10 The repetition of pedagogy, the practice of image sensation with pluralist thoughts, allows us to observe the limitless experiences or experiments of cinema in the postwar world system of the nation-states. From this perspective, cinema is always already geo-cinematography, which belongs to a specific region and makes “Asian cinema” possible. This possibility of Asian cinema seems to keep in with Takeuchi Yoshimi’s view on “Asia as method.” Takeuchi Yoshimi raised an issue of “Asia as Method” in the 1960s, and Kuan-Hsing Chen developed the concept further in the contemporary situation: Although equality might exist in Europe, one glance at the history of Europe’s colonial exploitation in Asia and Africa reveals that equality has not been attained by all. It is extremely difficult to imagine that Europe would be capable of effecting such global equality, and nowhere is this better understood than in Asia. Oriental poets have grasped this point intuitively, as can be seen in Tagore and Lu Xun. These poets feel that it is their role to achieve such global equality. Such ideas as Arnold Toynbee’s are currently fashionable, in which the Orient’s resistance against western invasion is said to lead to the homogenization of the world, but here as well one can discern the limits of the West. Asians today would disagree with this view. Rather the Orient must re-embrace the West, it must change the West itself in order to realize the latter’s outstanding cultural values on a greater scale. Such a rollback of culture or values would create universality. The Orient must change the West in order to further elevate those universal values that the West itself produced. This is the main problem facing East–West relations today, and it is at once a political and cultural issue.11 Yoshimi’s point is that Asia is not only part of the world but a place to “elevate” the universal values of the West. The elevation does not mean the universalization of the West, but rather the acceleration of its universal values. Yoshimi does not mean that Asia is responsible for helping the West forward. His focus lies on the universal values of the West, which are not  complete without Asia’s participation. As such, the meaning of “Asian cinema” would be  acceptable and the presupposition for “worlding cinema.” As a technological product, cinema is from the West, but, as Yoshimi points out, Asia must develop the universal values of cinema. “Asian cinema” does not indicate the cultural products simply made in Asia. What is Asian cinema, then? However, this question does not seem proper to identify Asian cinema because the problem does not appear to be with a question as to “what an Asian cinema is” but rather with the one as to “where an Asian cinema is.” In a geographical sense, Asia is not a single continent as in the case of Europe, and North and South America. Asia is multiple like a concept in philosophy. Many countries consist of what one quickly calls “Asia.” It is not easy to say what Asia is; it is always discursive, as Hannah Arendt says—a dislocated floating idea. Any single concept of Asia is not possible.

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East Asia can even be split into two regions—northeast Asia and southeast Asia. The former includes China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, which emerged out of a postwar Western distinction from the latter. Therefore, there are many Asias if one pursues any case study for Asian identity and culture. The identity of Asia today is an invention of the modern world, in particular of the postwar world system forged by American-led geopolitics. From this perspective, an issue to be raised with the identity of Asian cinema is not ethnicity or nationality. Modern Asia has rapidly transformed from the rural community to the industrial and urban society dominated by industrialization and urbanization. Furthermore, the reality of globalization has forced East Asian countries to face up the cultural conflictions between traditional values and Western values. The ongoing process of modernization and globalization is interwoven with the logic of cultural forms such as cinema. These days, there emerges a significant trend to remake an Asian cinema from Hong Kong, Japan, and Korea in Hollywood. The influence is not one-way but somewhat mutual. As Gary G. Xu points out, “Hollywood has had a long history of remaking commercially successful foreign films.”12 Early Hollywood preferred to remake mostly European movies, even though it was interested in Japanese films as well. None of the previous trends could be compared with the current remaking of Asian films; it has a big scale, vigorous intensity, massive publicity, and sufficient profit. As has been discussed, the international recognition of Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite would be possible in these circumstances. However, the meaning of Asian cinema seems to go beyond this success. Its existence is closely related to the ontology of cinema, which is the theoretical foundation of worlding cinema.

THE ONTOLOGY OF CINEMA According to André Bazin, cinema is “an idealistic phenomenon.”13 This definition implies two meanings: first, the cinematic phenomenon is only technical in its consequence; secondly, the idea precedes its technical invention. In this way, cinema necessarily finds out its place between idealism and realism. The concept of “worlding cinema” is possibly suggestive in discussing the ontology of cinema. As a phenomenon, cinema has an ontological structure forging an idea through its own means as a structure. It is the technology of mimesis that produces cinematic images, but its effects are not limited to representation. Bazin’s definition of cinema, that is, the double layers of cinematic technology, reminds us of Heidegger. Bazin is not Heideggerian, yet Heidegger’s discussion of technology would clarify Bazin’s point further. Heidegger puts the priority of the “readiness-to-hand” (Zuhanden) over the “presence-athand” (Vorhanden) by emphasizing the essential characteristics of objects for the mastery of particular practice and tools. From this perspective, he defines a phenomenon as “the showingitself-in-itself.”14 A phenomenon is not appearance, that is, “a reference-relationship,” but an encounter. Therefore, the appearance must be a phenomenon in its manifestation, because “the referring (or the announcing) can fulfil its possible function only if it shows itself in itself.”15 Of course, Heidegger was not very interested in cinema, and Bazin put his approach to the ontology of the cinematic image under the banner of psychoanalysis. However, Bazin’s point to bring psychoanalysis in his argument is that cinematic realism is the consequence of a “mummy complex” against death.16 For him, cinema as the successor of photography is “the evolution to date of plastic realism,” which “would provide a natural explanation for the great spiritual and technical crisis that overtook modern painting.”17 In this cinematic

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realism, the distinction between the imaginary and the real disappears. This integration is identical with a Surrealist aesthetic in which there is no split between an artistic purpose and a mechanical effect of image on our imagination. For Bazin, every object is inseparable from its image. Cinema as such is a natural creation, not a substitute for it, and consolidates hallucination and facts, that is, produces “an image that is a reality of nature.”18 In this sense, cinema always already comes along with the affective nature of technology. Without technology, there is no cinema. Technology is the existential condition of cinema. In Heidegger’s sense, technology is no mere means but a way of revealing. However, the mode of revealing in modern technology turns to “a challenging, which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such.”19 In this sense, for Heidegger, the mode of revealing, the technical characteristic in its right, becomes extremely “unreasonable” in modern technology. Modernized revealing is the challenging demand for extracting and storing up the concealed energy of nature. Heidegger calls this process of challenging-forth “unlocking”: That challenging happens in that the energy concealed in nature is unlocked, what is unlocked is transformed, what is transformed is stored up, what is stored up is, in turn, distributed, and what is distributed is switched about ever anew. Unlocking, transforming, storing, distributing, and switching about are ways of revealing. But the revealing never simply comes to an end. Neither does it run off into the indeterminate. The revealing reveals to itself its own manifoldly interlocking paths, through regulating their course. This regulating itself is, for its part, everywhere secured. Regulating and securing even become the chief characteristics of the challenging revealing.20 This mechanism of technological revealing attains its own rule, that is, a new law against the natural one. For Heidegger, this self-regulation of technology brings about a “setting-up,” which gathers people into ordering and concentrates them upon framing the real as standingreserve—in other words, “Ge-stell” (Enframing). Heidegger regards the essence of Enframing as “setting-upon gathered into itself which entraps the truth of its own coming to presence with oblivion.”21 The standing reserve of technology conceals the truth of its coming to presence. What worries Heidegger is how the technological concealment veils Being, putting it in danger by its entrapping. Because of this technological Enframing, we simply see nature as well as human beings as raw materials for mechanical operations. For this reason, Heidegger is hostile to cinema, in that, as he says, cinematography deprives us from “seeing and hearing” under its technological rule. However, Heidegger does not reject the possible change of Enframing. He affirms that “if Enframing is a destining of the coming to presence of Being itself, then we may venture to suppose that Enframing, as one among Being’s modes of coming to presence, changes.”22 What is crucial in Heidegger’s critique is not the Enframing of technology, but rather our orientation, that is, “self-adapting,” to technology. In Heidegger’s sense, a “destining” (Geschick) denotes the self-adaptation of oneself to the enframed reality. Therefore, any destining, or destination, always contains the possibility of turning around. However, this change does not mean a way to make any technology better. What is crucial here is to turn our attitude to technology around. In contrast to Heidegger, Bazin argues that “photography completely satisfies our appetite for illusion by means of a process of mechanical reproduction in which there is no human agency at work.”23 Bazin stresses the nonhuman aspect of photography and cinematic images. Bazin discovers the non-anthropocentric aspect of arts where Heidegger puts the essence of

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technology. Bazin’s ontology of cinema sets forth the philosophical foundation of worlding cinema. Cinema is not a pure psychological reflection of human eyesight but rather the series of images created by nature. Let us discuss Bazin’s concept of worlding cinema by taking Walter Benjamin’s concept of technology.

CINEMATIC WORLDING Bazin’s definition of cinematic ontology confirms to us that cinema continuously deconstructs and reconstructs technological Enframing. Cinema is a transcendental or intensive use of technology, that is, creation, not belonging to human self-adaptation, i.e., the experience of technology. The empirical dimension of technology presupposes human-nonhuman ensnarement. Therefore, the problem of experience is essential when considering worlding cinema. In his early philosophical writings about the experience, Benjamin criticizes experience that serves as the mask of the adult, the habitual criticism of youth. Benjamin’s claim seems to be a defense of a youthful perspective on life; his comment focuses on how the adult devalues youth according to his or her overwhelming experience. However, a more significant aspect resides in the way in which Benjamin tends to raise the question of experience against what he designates as the “philistine” who effortlessly comes to believe his or her “experience.” To quote Benjamin: Nothing is so hateful to the philistine as the “dream of his youth.” And most of the time, sentimentality is the protective camouflage of his hatred. For what appeared to him in his dreams was the voice of the spirit, calling him once, as it does everyone. It is of this that youth always reminds him, eternally and ominously. This is why he is antagonistic toward youth.24 Here, Benjamin implies the nightmare of history, in which the “voice of the spirit” is repressed as the unconscious. For Benjamin, experience, to some extent, serves as the reality principle whereby many blossoming dreams of youth cannot be satisfied; the philistine’s conviction of experience is a symbolic act to forget the imaginary dream of youth. What Benjamin’s critique focuses on is the representation of experience, which excludes lived experience. Benjamin makes a distinction between Erfahrung (linear experience) and Erlebnis (broken experience) in his later discussion of the experience. Erfahrung is retrospectively integrated, while Erlebnis is self-presence without selfpossession. For Benjamin, Erfahrung is no longer available to the individuals’ experience of modern urban life. Therefore, Erlebnis is the only modality of experience that we can have under the condition of modernity. Benjamin’s analysis of the relationship between the experience of technology and cinema is based, I suggest, on this early insight into experience. Positively considering the dialectical interaction between technical reproducibility and reality, Benjamin raises the critical question of cinematic realism, suggesting that the traditional meaning of mimesis is no longer possible in the age of modern technology. In this sense, Benjamin regards cinematic experience as Erlebnis rather than Erfahrung. Descriptive mimesis must be regarded as an illusion that conceals many fractions of reality. In other words, Benjamin implicitly raises the problem of empiricism in our optical perception. Technical reproducibility reveals the hidden dimensions foreclosed by optical experience. For Benjamin, “there is no greater error than the attempt to construe experience—in the sense of life experience—according to the model on which the exact natural sciences are

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based.”25 Benjamin posits observation as a medium of knowledge and perception based on “self-immersion.” Benjamin raises the issue of reality that is more real than reality as such. According to Benjamin, the presentation of reality in cinema provides mass audiences with the “equipment-free aspect of reality they are entitled to demand from a work of art, and does so precisely on the basis of the most intensive interpenetration of reality with equipment.”26 By assembling different parts according to a new law, cinematography dramatically changes the experiences of reality. Benjamin stresses how such aesthetic effects of cinema are indivisible from its technological means. He states that “the technological reproducibility of the artwork changes the relation of the masses to art.”27 The ontology of cinema seems to lie in this changed structure. From Bazin’s perspective, this duplicated aspect of cinematography is the ontological foundation of cinema as the apparent heir of photography. Bazin argues: This production by automatic means has radically affected our psychology of the image. The objective nature of photography confers on it a quality of credibility absent from all other picture-making. In spite of any objections our critical spirit may offer, we are forced to accept as real the existence of the object reproduced, actually re-presented, set before us, that is to say, in time and space. Photography enjoys a certain advantage in virtue of this transference of reality from the thing to its reproduction.28 Therefore, cinema is not merely the by-product of technology, but the manifestation of its assertive reproducibility. The technology of cinema is not an instrument, but the essence of representation. Unlike Heidegger’s emphasis on poetics rather than technology, for Benjamin, technological reproducibility forges the new condition of art. The experience of technology transforms the meaning of artworks; it is the technology that fulfills the contemporary mimetic impulse, yet, at the same time, the technical reproduction of art threatens the autonomy of artworks. This autonomous state of artworks is the condition of an aura. Considering the contradictory aspects of technology, Benjamin ultimately reveals the problem of commodification in the field of cultural production and regards cinema as the ambiguous product of capitalism. The unique phenomenon of an aura is a sublime autonomy of art, an autonomy understandable as a distance between spectators and artworks. The massive spectatorship of cinema is for Benjamin the fundamental change of the artistic condition. The technical reproducibility of artworks transforms how the masses react toward art and removes the auratic realm. Benjamin describes this transformation in his discussion of cinema: “[T]he decisive reason for this is that nowhere more than in the cinema are the reactions of individuals, which together make up the massive reaction of the audience, determined by the imminent concentration of reactions into a mass.”29 What Benjamin suggests in this analysis lies in the way in which cinema brings forth a new situation of artistic production and mass consumption in capitalism. He argues that “the reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into the progressive reaction toward a Chaplin movie.”30 The intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment whereby the masses produce the collective codes for a specific cultural form is a particular feature that constitutes the cultural power of cinema. It is noticeable that Benjamin witnessed the rise of the culture industry and its effect in his analysis of cinema. Here, he points out the new artistic condition, which entails that the absolute autonomy of artworks is no longer possible, in the sense that quantity turns out to be quality. Cinema was undoubtedly one of the catalysts for sharply boosting these transformations.

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CONCLUSION Worlding is the materialistic concept of bringing together subject and environment. Worlding cinema is, in this sense, a philosophical attempt to understand contemporary cinema from the perspective of nonrepresentational materialism. Heidegger’s understanding of technology is insightful to approach cinema from a metaphysical perspective, but his problem comes out clearly when he insists on the subjective openness toward technological revealing. His consideration of modern technology as Enframing sheds light on the crucial aspect of cinematography but is not enough to philosophize the experimental aspects of cinema. Benjamin’s understanding of cinema is a more materialistic approach to its existence, even though his idea of cinematic experience is still in a nostalgic mood. However, Benjamin’s analysis of cinematography seems to pave a way toward Bazin’s and Deleuze’s materialistic philosophy of cinema. Benjamin defines cinema as “mass art,” and this attribute is essential to clarify the reason why cinema is the significant mode of worlding today. Badiou’s attempt to integrate poetics and politics in terms of cinema is the example of the theoretical proposal for worlding cinema. Cinema does not reflect reality but creates the world. Cinema is always already worlding as such.

NOTES 1 Alain Badiou, Cinema, trans. Susan Spitzer (London: Polity, 2013), 233–4. 2 Ibid., 234. 3 Ibid., 184. 4 G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. John Sibree (New York: Prometheus Books, 1991), 55. 5 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 22. 6 Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations: 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 59. 7 Deleuze, Negotiations, 46. 8 Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 47. 9 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 247. 10 Ibid., 173. 11 Takeuchi Yoshimi, What Is Modernity?: Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi, trans. Richard F. Calichman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 165. 12 Gary G. Xu, “Remaking East Asia, Outsourcing Hollywood,” in East Asia Cinemas: Exploring Transnational Connections on Film, eds. Leon Hunt and Leung Wing-Fai (London: I.B.Tauris, 2008), 191. 13 André Bazin, What Is Cinema?, Vol.1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 17. 14 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962), 54. 15 Ibid., 54. 16 Bazin, What Is Cinema?, 17. 17 Ibid., 10. 18 Ibid., 16. 19 Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Garland Publishing, 1977), 14.

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20 Ibid., 16. 21 Ibid., 36. 22 Ibid., 37. 23 Bazin, What Is Cinema?, 6. 24 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol.1, 1913–1926, trans. Rodney Livingstone and others (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 4–5. 25 Ibid., 553. 26 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 1938–1940, ed. Michael W. Jenning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 264. 27 Ibid. 28 Bazin, What Is Cinema?, 13. 29 Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 264. 30 Ibid.

WORKS CITED Badiou, Alain. Cinema. Trans. Susan Spitzer. London: Polity, 2013. Badiou, Alain. Conditions. Trans. Steven Cocoran. London: Continuum, 2008. Bazin, André. What Is Cinema? Vol.1. Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 1913-1926. Trans. Rodney Livingstone and others. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 1938-1940. Ed. Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Deleuze, Gilles. Negotiations: 1972-1990. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962. Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Garland Publishing, 1977. Hegel, G. W. F. The Philosophy of History. Trans. John Sibree. New York: Prometheus Books, 1991. Taylor, Charles. Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Yoshimi, Takeuchi. What Is Modernity?: Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi. Trans. Richard F. Calichman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Xu, Gary G. “Remaking East Asia, Outsourcing Hollywood.” In East Asia Cinemas: Exploring Transnational Connections on Film. Eds. Leon Hunt and Leung Wing-Fai. London: I.B.Tauris, 2008.

CHAPTER TEN

Worlding Theater GINA MASUCCI MACKENZIE

That “all the world’s a stage” is beyond clichéd as an expression to describe the global relationship to theater. As with most clichés, however, there is great truth upon which it built. Performance arts are among some of the earliest forms of culture and communication. Ancient Egyptian, Indian, African, Greek, and Roman cultures all had forms of performance arts which, to varying degrees, approximated what we know as contemporary dramatic structure. We can reasonably estimate that many other ancient cultures also had performance arts as part of their societal development, but records of those performances or art forms are not as readily available. By the Middle Ages, more detailed records were kept of dramatic arts, and so contemporary audiences also can understand and appreciate the many forms of Japanese theater including Noh, Kabuki, Bunraku, and Butoh, theater of the Asian diaspora, Islamic puppet theater, and many variations of Western theater, developed primarily in response to the ancient Greek triad of tragedy, comedy, and satyr. Theater lives everywhere. It does not need to be “worlded.” It always has been the world. What needs to be recognized and discussed are the varying meanings of that “worlding.” Worlding, when applied as a critical lens to theater and performance studies, can be developed and categorized in three primary ways: globalization, application, and identification. Each of these three categories offers positive developments for theater studies, but embedded in each are also some serious impediments. Theater practitioners and critics alike need to be cautious, respectful, and most of all inquisitive about their understanding and practice of “worlding” theater.

THE GLOBAL STAGE “Worlding” is most expectedly a term associated with the globalization of theater that, from a Western perspective, begins with Modern drama in both Europe and the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. As with most forms of literature, including drama, poetry, and the novel, there was a great influx of Eastern influences on context, theme, and allusion used by Western writers beginning with the Modern era. W. B. Yeats’s Noh dramas can provide excellent examples of this. Although not primarily a dramatist, Yeats, along with his patron and great friend Lady Gregory, was heavily involved at the Abbey Theatre and worked to create the Modern equivalent of the masque or court drama. Yeats’s work drew from the Japanese tradition of Noh theater. It used highly stylized, ritualized movement, makeup and costuming, archetypal figures, and minimized dialogue combined with traditional Irish mythology. At the Hawk’s Well, probably the best-realized version of Yeats’s dramatic vision, retells part of the legend of Cuchulain, the great Gaelic warrior hero. To achieve authenticity, Yeats worked with Japanese choreographer and dancer Michio Ito, who performed in the

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play in both Ireland and the United States. This play stands as an example of the beginning of the contemporary movement toward globalization in theater. Globalization indicates the interdependency of systems, including but not limited to economic, political, social, and cultural systems. It is a process heralded by the West as one that promotes inclusivity and eschews Western dominance. While that altruistic perspective may or may not be present in current globalization efforts, what is certain is that globalization, in part, owes its practice to a heritage of empire building and colonization. The works of such theoretical greats here cannot be forgotten. Edward Said inaugurates the study of postcolonial theory, a reaction against broadly applied and Eurocentric globalization efforts. Orientalism makes the argument that the West’s fascination with “Oriental,” particularly Middle Eastern art, is an attempt to highlight the exotic and erotic features of a culture so as to hyperbolize differences and further distance East from West, as the process of exaggeration often skews the East so as to appear uneducated or animalistic. Glorifying a perceived basic instinct is often titillating when staged, and so performance arts, including theater and dance, are at risk of falling prey to the “Orientalist” tendencies of globalization. As Foster explains in her 2009 introduction to Worlding Dance, “[t]he tilting of art as world also promised maximum exposure to a cornucopia of the new and exotic.”1 Much of her introduction, reliant heavily on Said, demonstrates the connections both positive and negative between globalization or worlding of art and the potential for commercial success and revenue. When a performance bills itself as “world” or “global,” it implicitly promises something new, strange, and mysterious. It offers a world yet unknown and promises the audience special access and insight. In short, the offer of a global performance is not only an attempt to broaden the reach and understanding of artist and audience; it is a commercial proposition designed to attract an audience. With the commercial promise of globalization traversing the rotation of the world stage, combined with the critique of the position of the global performance as the Other, it is important to remember Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s provocative statement from A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: In the face of the possibility that the intellectual is complicit in the persistent constitution of the Other as the Self’s shadow, a possibility of political practice for the intellectual world would be to put the economy “under erasure,” to see the economic factor as irreducible as it reinscribes the social text, even as it is erased, however imperfectly, when it claims to be the final determinant or the transcendental signified.2 This warns us, with little room for argument, that the practice of blind globalization, by the intellectual or artistic elite, is done at the risk of the elimination of the authentic voice of those in the culture being marketed as global. For theater specifically, this also applies not only to works rehearsed or billed as “global” or those with nods to other traditions or traditions of the other, but to those works truly written or created outside of the dominant culture but staged within that culture. For example, Spivak’s caution would apply not only to presentation of Butoh dance by American troupes, but also to the very current revival of West Side Story using native-speaking Latino actors who bear witness to their cultural heritage. Gloria Anzaldúa furthers the caution in her bold work Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. There she writes, “Many women and men of color do not want to have any dealings with white people … Many feel that whites should help their own people rid themselves of race hatred and fear first.”3 This does not just apply to “real” life but to the staging of

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dramas conceived by or about people of color. Consider here everything from Porgy and Bess to For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf. These are brilliant, classic works about and by marginalized peoples. They help to broaden an audience’s worldview, but they must be staged with honesty and care. Without truthful presentation and acknowledgment of the forces involved in the production, there cannot be authenticity. The performance without authenticity cannot approximate anything that will effect global perspective in a positive way. It is possible to theorize that the worlding of theater will inaugurate an entirely new space, and that is not dependent on binary distinctions, racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, gender, sex, geographic, or other marginalizing distinctions. This is the kind of experience that Homi Bhabha describes in “The Commitment to Theory.” In that essay, Bhabha outlines his concept of hybridity, which derives from a “Third Space.” Hybridity is the result of worlding gone wild, which is not an exclusively negative reaction. It is a sophisticated version of the melting pot and is a beautiful danger. Hybrid theater presents performances with global influences. It is not of one culture or another, not from the colonized or colonizer, not from the dominant or marginalized culture. That mixture can be the spectacular creation of something entirely new that presents its own new world and truth, or it can be a diluted mixture that presents only a shadowy simulacrum of the artistic vision of any group. In theater arts, the stage or its equivalent frequently already functions as a type of “third space.” It is not the exclusive space of the actor or the audience; it is the space of the character, the narrative, the performance itself. The performance is the third. The space is usually the stage itself or any other location where the actual performance is staged. That is the world of the performance. Anything that happens in that performance space signals the addressing of a new world. That space is then considered strange to all involved. “Strangeness” is also an essential term in any discussion of globalization or worlding. The stranger is in the position of the frequently eroticized other who becomes the object of desire, the uncanny Other, too frequently subsumed and silenced by the dominant culture. When theater, a practice whose essential nature gives voice to ideas and peoples, tries to absorb the strange or, worse, sensationalize it, the art form has bastardized itself. What is needed for an attempt at authentic realization of “strangeness” is to abandon that concept altogether. The stranger is a perception of one group assuming the position of power over another group. That means the position of the stranger is indefinite and malleable. In “The World and the Home,” Bhabha develops the term “unhomeliness” to describe the feeling of the stranger alienated in a new land. From Bhabha’s perspective, this feeling is intensely negative, indicating the unwelcoming conditions with which an immigrant is faced. Much theater, even that created from within an artist’s own community, can produce for the art a feeling of unhomeliness. If the stranger is the person “unhomed,” one natural reactive instinct of the stranger is to build a home. A common adage among actors is “the theater is my home.” The theater can be the home of the stranger. The stage is already an intermediate space between “real life” and “fantasy.” The stage or performance space can then become the locus of revolt as the stranger asserts his or her story over the audience. Such is the crux of the argument in Robert Brustein’s classic, The Theatre of Revolt. Brustein theorizes that there are two basic options for modern theater: theater of communion and theater of revolt. As he writes, “[B]y theater of communion, I mean the theater of the past, dominated by Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Racine, where traditional myths were enacted before an audience of believers against the background of a shifting but still coherent universe.”4 In the theater of communion, there is no need to address concepts such as the stranger or the unhomed because all involved, both

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actor and audience, are complicit in reinforcing the insularity of the community in which the performance is taking place. Brustein goes on to explain that “if the theater of communion climaxes with a sense of spiritual disintegration, the theater of revolt begins with this sense, inheriting from the Western tradition a continuity of decay in an advanced stage.”5 The theater of revolt is characterized “as the note of banishment is repeatedly struck, and the modern drama aches with nostalgia, loneliness and regret”; Brustein recounts the question that Ibsen rhetorically asks of George Brandes, namely, “Where am I to find my homeland.”6 Modern drama, which is indentified the theater of revolt, is characterized by the many of the same feeling of unhomeliness that Bhabha describes. The worlding of theater attempts to give greater living space to theater to allow it to be inclusive and provide a space of broad exploration. Worlding attempts to give revolt a home. Worlding, frequently though, has the opposite effect. Instead of home building, or even sustained revolt, the space becomes too large and unfocused. There are too many little revolutions happening to gain any traction. Perhaps that is good. While revolution brings new and fresh ideas, it also has a leveling function. Revolution overthrows the old but replaces it with a universal. Worlding of any sort carries with it that danger. In the prologue to Staging Strangers: Theatre and Global Ethics, Barry Freeman offers another version of the revolution of globalization. Freeman proclaims, with a little naiveté: “[T]heater is going global. Stages that once were platforms for voicing local stories now commonly feature stories about distant places and issues as well.”7 He goes on to use the Canadian Cahoots Theatre Company as an example of how local theater companies, beginning in the 1980s, started staging productions of immigrant experience or international focus. While moderately optimistic about these attempts, Freeman cautions that the ethics of such endeavors must be carefully considered. He explains that the situation in which Cahoots or any similar company finds itself “exposes a gap between the sunny, utopian rhetoric of interculturalism and the continued realities of inequality and precarity.”8 He explains that this is not only a political matter, but an ethical one. The stranger deserves to be recognized, but in what way? As he answers, “[A]rguably, a politics of recognition is a prerequisite to an ethics of difference in the sense that an individual or community can only deliberate on ethics if it has the space to do so in the first place.”9 Theater can be that space. It should not be a space that proclaims what the world is or what it should be, but it should be a space that presents options. That is honest, ethical worlding. Worlding is not only meant to bring people together, although bringing disparate groups together for understanding, conversation, and debate is a positive goal. It also must necessarily entail some form of alienation. If we again recall Bhabha’s unhomeliness, marginalized peoples are bound to feel alienated from the homeland, which they left either by choice or under duress. Simultaneously, they feel set apart from their new residence. This sort of doubled alienation is not uncommon in theater. In many ways, it is the effect that Brecht practiced. Brecht is nearly unparalleled in this upheaval of theater practice and his writing about those revolutionary practices. In “Indirect Impact of the Epic Theatre,” an essay that serves as his notes on Die Mutter, he writes: “A collective entity is created in the auditorium for the duration of the entertainment, on the basis of the ‘common humanity’ shared by all spectators alike. Non-Aristotelian drama of Die Mutter’s sort is not interested in the establishment of such an entity. It divides its audience.”10 This short quotation indicates many of Brecht’s innovations. The notion of “collective entity” points to his idea that the audience and actors are all part of building an experience together; ironically though, that experience is not designed to bring people to a singular realization or even to bring the audience to a cathartic

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experience but instead to alienate all involved. For Brecht, that means separating the actor from the text/character and the audience from emotive identification. Divorced from cathartic expectations, the audience feels more comfortable with the division for which he aims. Such division is, in part, the opposite of worlding or globalization of theater. Brecht’s entire project of revamping theater is anti-unification. Augusto Boal, the Brazilian theater practitioner and theorist, embraces similar and potentially even more overtly political approaches to theater in The Theatre of the Oppressed. He highlights social stratification when he writes that “[T]he bourgeoisie presents the spectacle. On the other hand, the proletariat and the oppressed classes do not know yet what their world will be like; consequently their theater will be the rehearsal, not the finished spectacle.”11 There is great freedom in this assessment that cuts across cultural divides. Boal does not read the world in terms of horizontal difference but sees vertical stratification as the main impediment to societal progress. Rehearsal is also a vertical process as it is a process of becoming. The revolutionary spirit of political theater, regardless of the culture in which it is being created, is enacted through the rehearsal process. It is key here to remember Boal’s emphatic statement: The poetics of the oppressed is essentially the poetics of liberation; the spectator no longer delegates power to the characters either to think or to act in his place. The spectator frees himself; he thinks and acts for himself! Theatre is action! Perhaps the theatre is not revolutionary in itself; but have no doubts, it is a rehearsal of revolution!12 This aggressive nature of theater and the promise of revolt that is housed within the art form are famously articulated in Brecht’s “Emphasis on Sport,” written in 1918. As he writes in “Emphasis on Sport,” “A theatre which makes no contact with the public is nonsense.”13 Contact combined with division results in a theatrical experience that brings attention to difference. Plot, performance style, and spectacle for Brecht are all efforts pointed at separation. In this way, Brechtian theater and all theater experiments that follow in the Brechtian tradition are, in some ways, anti-global. They do not aim to find a common ground where all differences are mitigated or eliminated. They do not long for a place of unification. Brechtian theater celebrates contrast, even disparity among peoples. While that can be understood as true worlding, that is not the common usage of the term. As Brecht explains, The learning-play is essentially dynamic; its task is to show the world as it changes (and also how it may be changed) … [T]he latter theater holds that the audience is a collection of individuals, capable of thinking and reasoning, of making judgments even in the theatre; it treats it as individuals of mental and emotional maturity, and believes it wishes to be so regarded14 Emphasized in Brechtian theater is fierce individuality of thought. Global or worlded theater should remember this. The goal is not to erase but to embrace difference. Brecht’s acting and directorial style highlights difference as it breaks with basic theater traditions, including the idea of the fourth wall, by developing his “alienation effect.” Drawn from his study of Chinese theater, the “alienation effect” is, in Brecht’s account, a performance in which “the audience can no longer have the illusion of being the unseen spectator at an event which is really taking place.”15 As he explains, “[T]he artist’s object is to appear strange and even surprising to the audience.”16 The artist needs to be the stranger,

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so that the audience can feel unhomed. If the audience is put in the position of the stranger, alienated from homeland and new space, then the audience can appreciate the difficulties that arise from a globalization “without consciousness.” Brecht always understood theater, his theater, to be a political endeavor. In the realm of the political, he divides theater into two categories: popular and realistic. As he details, Our conception of realism needs to be broad and political, free from aesthetic restrictions and independent of convention. Realist means: laying bare society’s causal network / showing up the dominant viewpoint as the viewpoint of the dominators / writing from the standpoint of the class which has prepared the broadest solutions for the most pressing problems afflicting human society / emphasizing the dynamics of development / concrete and so as to encourage abstraction.17 Brecht’s theatrical project is always realistic; it aims to expose the rift between the elite and the oppressed. This is the true spirit of worlding theater. It must expose those fault lines and acknowledge their existence both within and between cultures. One of those fault lines is the language and the Babel that is our world. Theater lives in an intermediary state, both reliant on language as a primary means of communication and able to eschew language for movement as that primary vehicle for communication. Brecht and his theatrical opposite Artaud both want to escape language as the primary means of communication in theater. Brecht develops the alienation effect, an anti-Stanislavskian acting technique that relies on the actor calling attention to himself or herself as an actor delivering lines and asks the actor or actress to use speech patterns and vocal inflection counter to usual vocal rhythms. Forcing the rift in language apprehension can call attention to the beautiful multiplicity of languages in which theater can be presented. By disassociating language from meaning, at least in part, Brecht’s alienation effect aims at a kind of worlding that calls attention to the fact that language, in a very Lacanian sense, frequently misses its mark. It is only a mechanism for communication if all in the circle of communication are versed in or complicit with the same language system. When different systems collide, the lack of traditional communication is evident. That opens up a space for new ways of communication and effort in understanding different cultures. It gives an opportunity for honest appreciation of the difficulty in understanding each other. In part, it points to the “difference” which Derrida theorizes as one starting point for deconstruction. Worlding should be a deconstructive process. Building a world, one world, denies minority peoples and ideas a space to grow. Worlding should be a project that builds multiple worlds with endless perspectives. Artaud’s emphasis on spectacle attempts to bypass language altogether and build a new experience via spectacle. In his Preface to The Theater and Its Double, Antonin Artaud writes, [A]nd the fixation of the theater in one language—written words, music, lights, noises— betokens its imminent ruin, the choice of any one language betraying a taste for the special effects of that language; and the desiccation of the language accompanies its limitation. For the theater as for culture, it remains a question of naming and directing shadows; and the theater not confined to a fixed language or form not only destroys false shadows but prepares the way for a new generation of shadows, around which assembles the true spectacle of life. To break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the theater.18

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Artaud’s writing and practice insist that theater be an art that transcends that conventional mechanisms of communication to achieve a more visceral and inclusive experience than traditional Western theater provides. Artaud’s comparison of theater to plague, reread in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, feels a little too raw, but Artaud’s intention is to stimulate the emotions and anxieties of his audiences. His intention is to move beyond or below the social revolution that Brecht’s work demands to physical challenge and psychological upheaval. He relies on the concept of cruelty as the driving force of theater, explaining that “the exteriorization of a depth of latent cruelty by means of which all the perverse possibilities of the mind, whether of an individual or a people, are localized.”19 To localize in Artaud’s lexicon is to pinpoint the trauma that theater produces on the body. Within the project of worlding theater, Artaud’s emphasis on the local implores audiences to remember that theater can only make meaning when it is imprinted with harsh truths and specific references. Artaud emphasizes the “possibilities for realization in the theater related entirely to the mise en scene considered as a language in space and in movement.”20 With admiration for the Balinese theater in particular, Artaud constantly reminds readers that theater is an indigenous effort. It achieves global reach through a concerted effort to remain regional. Maurice Saillet writes that “Artaud declares his willingness to destroy all forms of language and all social proprieties in order to bring life into the theatre and make actors and spectators alike into ‘victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.’”21 Artaud’s attempt at globalization is a project of leveling through “cruelty” old assumptions about theater, language, and performance. To rebuild, in Artaudian theater, is to present a new theater that can speak to all through the reinterpretation of themes he identifies in “The Theater of Cruelty (First Manifesto).” Among those, most important are spectacle, language, immediacy, and cruelty. Direct contact, elimination of the division between audience and actor, and ritualization of presentation all aim at the creation of a new world stage. Artaud’s theater is an amalgamation of elements seeking to paint a new global picture. These admirable efforts translate into a wide array of contemporary theater practices, including Fringe Festivals and street performances that blur the lines between traditional theater and experimental presentation. The ritualistic nature of theater, which Artaud sought, is the focus of anthropological studies of the relationship between culture and theater. Turner’s work first done in the field with the Ndembu people of Uganda and then continued on four continents seeks to understand the relationship between cultural development and presentation. Turner asserts that theater or performance is the key component of presenting and disseminating cultural experience. For Turner, globalization or exposure to global cultures happens via the theatrical event. That event often explores the liminal experience of a culture or that experience that allows participants to hover between the real and the symbolic, the monstrous and the ordinary. As Turner describes liminality, it is “fructile chaos, a fertile nothingness, a storehouse of possibilities, not by any means a random assemblage but a striving after new forms and structure, a gestation process, a fetation of modes appropriate to and anticipating postliminal existence.”22 Liminality is related to worlding in that the liminal, as condition, is shared by all cultures, but what the liminal point is changes based on the individual society. For performance, the basic goal then is similar across the globe; theater puts actor and audience in the liminal space and allows them to explore in a way that turns Aristotle’s catharsis one hundred eighty degrees: [L]ife itself now becomes a mirror held up to art, and the living now perform their lives, for the protagonists of social drama, a “drama of living,” have been equipped by aesthetic drama

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with some of the most salient opinions, imageries, tropes and ideological perspectives. Neither mutual mirroring, life by art, art by life, is exact for each is not a planar mirror but metrical mirror; at each exchange something new is added and something old is lost or discarded.23 The lost and discarded elements of cultural experience are what are most concerning in the worlding process. While worlding brings new developments in theater and different experiences to cultures, and while it brings the promise of conversation, the meshing of disparate ideas, and the creation of new art forms, there is the risk of losing what is valued and valuable about singular cultural experiences. Those too must be preserved. In the worlding process, it is imperative to both develop the new and to preserve the traditional. Some of the most innovative and important developments in the true worlding of theater are in the field of applied theater. Prentki and Preston define applied theater as “a term describing a broad set of theatrical practices and creative processes that take participants and audiences beyond the scope of conventional mainstream theater into the realm of a theater that is response to ordinary people and their stories, local settings and priorities.”24 It is a vast term that can cover theater for, by, or with a specific community. It is likely to be a grassroots theatrical event or a didactic performative experience. At first glance, such efforts may seem antithetical to globalization as they are focused on a specific community, frequently a community within a community, but it is important to remember that most of these community efforts are produced by or for marginalized or underserved populations. In such efforts, the means by which marginalized populations are presented on stage is essential. It is the duty of the producers and performers to be honest to both the creator’s intention and the spirit of the peoples being represented. This is, by no means, a call for strict realism but is instead an imperative to honor the core of what it means to be marginalized. That is no easy feat. It is the challenge addressed by many facets of postcolonial, feminist, ethnic, and gender studies, to name just a few scholarly fields devoted to marginalized groups. There is no easy answer to the question of how to best represent a group. Within the field of applied theater, Sheila Preston notes that representation, understood as “a powerful system of communication whereby meaning is culturally constructed and received, is of deep relevance of cultural practices of film, theater, visual arts and social research; and for cultural workers involved in the making, shaping and creating of representations in these spheres.”25 What Preston points out here is the idea that representation cannot be divorced from group activity, either in construction or understanding. She goes on to explain that “the reality that representations depict the real lives of individuals or groups who may be vulnerable and/ or marginalized from the dominant hegemony is an ethical as well as political concern.”26 She uses the trope of the disabled individual only being represented through the ability to overcome adversity as an example of the limits that representation places on marginalized groups. The reduction of a group’s experience to one type of moment denies the full range of human experience. It is, in short, unethical and robs the group being represented of their potential political power. The means of representation can limit the political influence of a group. Preston presents “community-generated theatre” as a means of improving the problem of full and accurate representation. When the performance is created and executed by the people being represented within it, the authenticity of the applied theater process is more

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fully realized. The process is applied as it is a didactic effort to educate a larger population about a marginalized group. That group can either exist within a larger cultural societal network or can be a totally different culture group altogether. That group, though, is considered to be the Other. Otherness, as a concept, belongs to a myriad of theoretical and discipline-based perspectives. Sue Wilkinson and Celia Kitzinger take up the concept in relation to feminism and the Other specifically, but their work can apply to Others, in general. As they remind us, [N]o theoretical discussion of “representing the Other” can fail to take up the question of the category itself. We cannot write about the Other as if some totalizable intelligible object simply “exists” there, waiting to be represented. Others are constructed—by those who do the Othering, by those who reflect upon that Othering, and by the Others’ own representations of themselves27 Here, the theater community could add “in performance” to the Other’s meaning by addressing how marginalized communities can be worlded in performance. Like foreign and under-represented populations, “others, by definition, are oppressed and marginalized by the dominant culture; consequently, their cultures and traditions are typically represented as inferior or pathological.”28 It is important to add to Said’s notion that, at best, the Other is made into a mysterious, sensualized being, reduced only to that exotic part of self which fascinates the colonizer. There is a risk here for theater. If performance only focuses on the strangeness of the Other, then worlding is a large-scale staging of fetishistic behavior. It is Freudian sexuality on stage—Marxist theory performed. It is a terrible approach to worlding. The aim of worlding is completion. That should not be reductive globalization, which, like the trope of the American melting pot, reduces all theatrical efforts to tasteless mush. It should be inclusivity of all perspectives from around the globe and from within each population in it. Worlding also cannot be finite. It is not an end point, but a process, for each time we think we have examined every perspective, a new one arises that deserves consideration. This makes performance limitless and so ensures an infinite number of new and creative theatrical experiences. The process of worlding is as limitless as the unconscious itself and ultimately operates as such. Roland Vegso’s brilliant exploration of worldlessness gives some final insights, especially with regard to Lacan’s work on the signifier. Lacan explains that first there is the world or the primary structures of the mind and the structures it perceives; that world can be very private and insular. It is not global but intensely particular and unique. Lacan then claims that the individual moves from the world to the stage. The stage reverses the roles of the signifier and the signified. It turns logical structures on their heads and exposes those who assume they have power, the signifiers in the audience, pointing out how the real power is placed on the signified, or those on the stage. When theater practitioners stage or allow the staging of global cultures and underserved populations, those minorities are taking back the ability to signify themselves. When the signifier can signify himself, in the Lacanian lexicon, he has reach psychosis, but he has also attained freedom.29 The worlding of theater certainly entails chaos, but if it can free, even for a short amount of time, those in bondage by society’s rules, then it is an endeavor that we must undertake.

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NOTES 1 Susan Leigh Foster, “Wolrding Dance: An Introduction,” in Worlding Dance, ed. Susan Leigh (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 2. 2 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Post Colonial Reason: Toward a History of Vanishing Presence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 266. 3 Gloria Anzaldúa, “Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Chapter 7. La consciencia de la mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness,” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001), 2218. 4 Robert Brustein, The Theatre of Revolt: Studies in Modern Drama from Isben to Genet (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1962), 4. 5 Ibid., 6. 6 Ibid., 11. 7 Barry Freeman, Staging Strangers: Theatre and Global Ethics (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017), 3. 8 Ibid., 8. 9 Ibid., 12. 10 Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willet (New York: Hill & Wang, 1957), 60. 11 Augusto Boal, “Poetics of the Oppressed,” in George W. Brandt, ed., Modern Theories of Drama: A Selection of Writing on Drama and Theater, 1840–1990 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 30. 12 Ibid., 260. 13 Brecht, “Emphasis on Sport,” 7. 14 Ibid., 11 15 Brecht, “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting,” Brecht on Theatre, 91. 16 Ibid., 92 17 Brecht, “The German Drama: Pre-Hitler,” Brecht on Theatre, 79. 18 Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 12–13. 19 Ibid., 30. 20 Ibid., 46. 21 Ibid., 154. 22 Victor Turner, “Are There Universals of Performance in Myth, Ritual, and Drama,” Brandt, Modern Theories of Drama, 65. 23 Ibid., 67. 24 Tim Prentki and Sheila Preston, “Applied Theatre: An Introduction,” in The Applied Theatre Reader (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), 9. 25 Sheila Preston, “Introduction to Ethics of Representation,” The Applied Theatre Reader, 66. 26 Ibid. 27 Sue Wilkinson and Cella Kitzinger, “Representing the Other,” in The Applied Theatre Reader, eds. T. Prentki and S. Preston (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), 88. 28 Ibid., 88. 29 Roland Vegso, Worldlesness after Heidegger: Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, Deconstruction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 80.

WORKS CITED Anzaldúa, Gloria. “Borderland/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, chapter 7. La consciencia de la mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001. 2208–23. Artaud, Antonin. The Theatre and Its Double. New York: Grove Press, 1958.

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Boal, Augusto. “Poetics of the Oppressed.” Modern Theories of Drama: A Selection of Writings on Drama and Theatre, 1840–1990. Ed. George W. Brandt Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. 254–60. Brandt, George W., ed. Modern Theories of Drama: A Selection of Writing on Drama and Theatre, 1840-1990. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Ed. Trans. John Willet. New York: Hill & Wang, 1957. Brustein, Robert. The Theatre of Revolt: Studies in Modern Drama from Ibsen to Genet. Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1962. Foster, Susan Leigh, ed. “Worlding Dance: An Introduction.” Worlding Dance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 1–12. Freeman, Barry. Staging Strangers: Theatre and Global Ethics. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017. Prentki, Tim, and Sheila Preston. “Applied Theatre: An Introduction.” Eds. Tim Prentki and Sheila Preston. The Applied Theatre Reader. Abingdon: Routledge, 2007. 9–15. Preston, Sheila. “Introduction to Ethics of Representation.” Ed. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. A Critique of Post Colonial Reason: Toward a History of Vanishing Presence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. 65–9. Turner, Victor. “Are There Universals of Performance in Myth, Ritual, and Drama?” Modern Theories of Drama: A Selection of Writings on Drama and Theatre, 1840–1990. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. 62–70. Vegso, Roland. Worldlesness after Heidegger: Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, Deconstruction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020. Wilkinson, Sue, and Cella Kitzinger. “Representing the Other.” In The Applied Theatre Reader. Ed. T. Prentki and S. Preston. Abingdon: Routledge, 2007, 86–93.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

Worlding Religion GERDA HECK AND STEPHAN LANZ

“There were three of us; we had just crossed the border from Syria to Turkey. We climbed into the back of a truck and ducked behind fruit boxes. It was about four o’clock in the morning when we suddenly stopped in the middle of the road. We heard noises, voices … I was afraid it was the police. I prayed to God ‘Please God, don’t let them find us!’ They opened the truck and searched for something with a flash-light … They didn’t find us … All of us felt relieved and we started to thank and praise God!” This is a testimony—offered by a parishioner in front of the church community, thanking God  for having helped him cross the border—during the Sunday service of a Congolesebased revival church in Istanbul in spring 2011. It reveals two notable connections between religion and migration: the role of faith for the believer on the migration journey as a whole and the specificity of spaces in which religion is practiced along the migration route. These locations are part of the broader “religious infrastructure,”1 in which believers share religious and day-to-day life experiences, keep up with their religious duties, and serve as reference points, all while being mobile. The religious parishes and their urban place-making are closely entangled with the position of Congolese communities in the cities and their emanating daily life and reproduction practices. In recent years, urban studies have demonstrated a growing significance of very diverse religious movements in global metropolises. Urban religion is, thereby, not merely conceived as a cluster of religious practices and structures within a bounded urban space but also as configurations where the religious and the urban are interwoven, reciprocally productive, and mutually transformative.2 Drawing on empirical findings of multi-sited ethnographic field research conducted in the scope of the research project “Global Prayers. Redemption and Liberation in the City,”3 we discuss in this chapter religious worlding practices, which include circulating/globalizing models of urban sociality and urban spatiality. We analyze the linkages between transnational migration routes, urban structures, the social and economic self-organization and religious identity of migrants, as well as their religious worlding practices, using the example of Congolese-based Christian revival churches in three Global South metropolises—Guangzhou (China), Istanbul (Turkey), and Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). All three cities are not traditional destinations of postcolonial Congolese migration and have only recently emerged as destination or transit places, as well as junctions within global routes of Congolese migrants. Hereby, we look at the ways in which religious worlding practices refer to aspirations and imaginations to create alternative (religious) urban worlds. In their seminal book Worlding Cities,4 Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong unfold a specific idea of “worlding” as an analytical framework of postcolonial urbanism that is capable of examining urban situations, both in their

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particular and their global aspects, without subjecting them to overly simplistic explanatory models. Their analytical framework breaks with the mainstream “core-periphery model of globalization.”5 Hence (urban-religious) worlding practices can be seen as interventions within urban space, situated in everyday practices and understood as a dynamic “nexus of situated and transnational ideas, institutions, actors and practices.”6 Within the scope of the case studies we present in this chapter, worlding refers, on the one hand, to the aspirations and imaginations informing religiously motivated attempts to create alternative urban worlds that transcend the city as it exists in reality. On the other hand, drawing on AbdouMaliq Simone,7 it shows how religious migrants create global networks, which could also be seen as a process of “worlding from below.” Comparing their spatial practices in the three metropolises examined, we will show how Congolese religious believers, although often at the margins of society, practice a religious worlding from below. In doing this, we will concentrate on three main aspects: the transnational mobility of the believers and the accompanying emergence of parishes globally, the function of these “sacred spaces” for the believers, and the role faith plays for their migratory journey.

RELIGIOUS REVIVAL IN THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO For more than three decades, Pentecostalism has had a massive impact on the religious culture of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), as it has in other countries in the sub-Saharan region.8 The religious landscape of the DRC has been radically modified under the term “Église de Réveil,” as most of the Pentecostal churches that relate to a religious revival and awakening are called. This revival has emerged since the end of the Mobutu era and against the background of political instability, economic crisis, and escalating violence and has effected more aspects than just the religious sphere.9 Dating back to the early 1990s, the Congolese public spheres and culture have become increasingly charismatic, thanks to the Pentecostal movement.10 The thousands of churches have not only redesigned urban spaces but also the social and moral landscapes of the DRC. New forms of religious music, film, and theater productions, as well as radio and TV stations with a “charismatic habitus”11 have developed. Furthermore, traditional models of kinship, moral agendas of reciprocity, and solidarity have been redefined and restructured.12

CONGOLESE MIGRATION TRAJECTORIES—RELIGIOUS TRAJECTORIES For many decades, the Congolese have emigrated to other African countries, Europe, and North America.13 Due to the escalating crisis in the DRC in the late 1980s, the Congolese more frequently started to emigrate to Europe, the United States, and Canada, but also to other African countries. This happened when mobility and migration globally became a major concern and especially when the hegemonic states of the Global North established a new mobility regime by dramatically restricting their migration policies with far-reaching consequences.14 In response to these new restrictive policies, the Congolese started to alter their migration strategies and follow new routes, either undertaking circuitous journeys that sometimes take years and involve transiting several countries before reaching their desired destination, or targeting new destinations. Countries like Turkey or Brazil with relatively open visa policies

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turned into new transit and immigration countries. In addition, countries like China have, due to their accessible business visa and trading opportunities, become new destinations for Congolese migrants. In the cities the Congolese target, whether Istanbul, Rio de Janeiro, Rabat, or Athens, sub-Saharan African revival parishes have arisen. They serve as crucial connecting and meeting points within a larger network of moving, remaining, or trading believers. Space is, in fact, a key lens for examining how migrant groups situate themselves in the urban and global context. Congolese revival churches emerge in and are influenced by the context of an ongoing transnational mobility of their believers. As restricting and stratifying national migration policies are impacting these mobility practices,15 the (spatial) character of the churches in the metropolises is also affected. The use and relevance of “sacred spaces,” which are first of all spaces for worshipping, are shaped by the believers and pastors themselves but also by urban and national settings in the migration context. The parishes and their urban place-making are closely entangled with the position of the migrant communities in the cities and their emanating daily life and reproduction practices.

ISTANBUL—LIVING IN TRANSIT During the last twenty years, Turkey has become an important immigration hub for migrants from Africa. Congolese migrants have increasingly targeted Istanbul, and although most of them regard Turkey only as a transit country, there is a growing number who find themselves stuck there because they are unable to continue their journey into Europe.16 Many seek asylum at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in hopes of resettlement to a Western country after their recognition, while others try to journey on to Europe clandestinely. In addition, one can find Congolese students living in Istanbul, as well as suitcase traders who travel backward and forward between Istanbul and Kinshasa, but also between Istanbul and Paris, London, Brussels, or Johannesburg. Due to its vast fluidity, the Congolese community in Istanbul remains small, estimating itself between 100 and 150 individuals in 2015. Around ten African charismatic and Pentecostal churches have emerged since the beginning of the 2000s in the center of Istanbul, among them the Congolese Église charité. Though rents are high, almost all of them are situated around Taksim Square or in the neighboring districts, while their parishioners predominantly live in the disadvantaged neighborhoods of the city. Located in the European part of Istanbul, Taksim Square is a main transportation hub as well as one of the most popular destinations for locals and tourists, surrounded by large hotels, restaurants, and fast-food chains. Looking at the urban landscapes, these churches are not visible at first sight. Officially not registered, many of them are subtenants in already existing Evangelical or Protestant churches, while others convene in basement apartments or in hotel lounges.

FAITH ALONG THE ROUTE Many transiting Congolese only want to stay a short period in Istanbul. In the majority of cases, though, after arriving, things become very different: the migrants have already run out of money or prices for the transfer to Greece are too high; they need to wait for a better season to cross the sea, or after applying at UNHCR, they have to wait for the decision and resettlement. Turkey is signatory to the UN’s 1951 Geneva Convention and the 1967

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Protocol, but it only accepts applicants coming from Europe. Non-Europeans have to apply at the UNHCR for refugee status. If granted, asylum seekers are resettled mainly to North American or Scandinavian countries; if it is denied, they have to leave Turkey. This procedure can sometimes take several years. Hence, they have to find ways to make a living and deal with long waiting periods. Most Congolese do odd jobs, such as carrying boxes or goods for storeowners or at the market, and others work in small workshops. Women sometimes find jobs as domestic or sex workers. As Congolese believers emphasized, while waiting to journey on, living as an African Christian minority in a “white” Muslim-dominated country, and being subject to arbitrary state power as well as to racial discrimination in daily life, the L’église charité constitutes a place of refuge for them, a meeting point for the community and a space to regroup. Churchgoers emphasized the different style of spirituality, the (African) way of celebrating, preaching in Lingala and French, the music and the dancing, which enables them to experience the “power of the divine.” Out of the Sunday worship, they draw the spiritual strength that supports them in their daily life. So did Muana, one of our interview partners, who in the fall of 2015 traveled from Kinshasa to Istanbul as the first stop on his journey to Europe. Although he knew next to nothing about Istanbul, he already had heard about a Congolese church on the Bosporus. Upon arrival there, friends introduced him to the Église charité, and shortly after, he started to pray and to preach the gospel there. In the spring of 2016, Muana and some friends tried to continue their journey to Greece, but they failed and were deported back to Turkey. While being detained in a Turkish deportation center, they started to organize daily prayers among themselves: Especially during these kind of situations, you need to gather and pray. Only with God’s blessing can you hope to endure those extremely precarious situations in which you do not know what might happen to you. But, eventually with the help of God and a human rights lawyer, we got released, and as soon as it was possible we journeyed on again and left Turkey.

WORSHIPPING AND TRADING Attending church on Sunday is regarded as a primary Christian duty. In Istanbul, the parishioners also take advantage of another aspect of the church. A few years ago, the head of the church, Pastor Alain, together with some of his parishioners, founded an informal business enterprise organizing and intermediating for Congolese and other French-speaking African traders who regularly come to Istanbul. They pick them up at the airport and put them up in a hotel; they accompany them to the sellers, bargain, and translate for them. Most of the traders coming to Istanbul buy clothing or electrical devices. Many of them are believers, and some are even pastors who preach on Sundays in the Istanbul-based revival church. Due to the constant coming and going of Congolese traders, as well as the transiting of remaining church members, new transnational contacts are established and furthered within the church, which has an effect on the local situation of the parishioners. Some of them, like Muana, make their living by intermediating for the traders while residing in Istanbul. Our research introduced us to several Congolese traders (and pastors) from Vienna, Brussels, Kinshasa, Johannesburg, Abidjan, or Libreville, who attended the Église Charité during their stay or, as pastors, preached in the church. Some of the traders were not only

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traveling to Istanbul but also made use of connections on business trips to Guangzhou and/or Dubai. So did Nicole, a trader, who traveled backed by a church fellow for her first trading trip to Istanbul and, during this trip, attended the Sunday service of L’église charity. Since then, she expended her travels to Dubai, New York, and Guangzhou, which she visits about four times a year. As we described above, in Istanbul, where social and religious exclusion, as well as precariousness, state arbitrariness, and racism determine great parts of the Congolese believers’ daily life, the church symbolizes an important place of refuge for the transiting and residence Congolese. The space itself is closely entangled with economic activities, as well as a permanent fluidity, as trading and transiting Congolese are the majority.

RIO DE JANEIRO A generous refugee law, introduced in 1997, and comparatively open visa policies have made Brazil an attractive transit and immigration country for the Congolese.17 Since 2003, there has been significant growth in the number of refugee applicants from the DRC.18 As in Istanbul, the vast majority of arriving Congolese plan to travel onward to North America or Europe. Many have already transited via South Africa or Angola to reach Brazil. Arriving Congolese are predominately young single women and men but also comprise families. Without any official figures concerning the size of their co-ethnics, the Congolese estimate their number in Rio to be around 400. A considerable number of them are refugees, undocumented migrants, or students. Although most have middle-class backgrounds and many are graduates, the majority struggle to make a living in Rio. Notwithstanding long working hours, wages are low and finding work seems to be a problem. Men predominantly work in construction, and women work as hairdressers, dishwashers, and sex workers or sell African dishes to the community. As L. K. Kina, the head of the music band of the Assembléia de Deus em Bras de Pina, a Congolese revival parish, told us at our first encounter: We are foreigners in this country, and many of us are in transit. When you arrive here, you go to church in order to pray with the brothers and sisters. But we do not only pray together, your brother might facilitate you a job or support you while searching for an apartment. In the parish we find our compatriots and orientation; it’s a place of home in a foreign environment. At that time, after living several years in South Africa and in Angola, L. K. Kina had just arrived in Rio. Unlike Istanbul, Rio’s urban landscape is marked by thousands of Brazilian Pentecostal churches. The percentage of Evangelicals and Pentecostals in the supposedly largest Catholic country in the world rose from 6.6 percent to 22.2 percent between 1980 and 2010, with its highest increase occurring in Rio and São Paulo.19 Structures of urban violence, which for decades have dominated everyday life in the irregular settlements (favelas), contribute to Pentecostal growth. In light of this urban violence, certain religious interpretations, in particular those offered by the Pentecostal churches, become more plausible and attract increasing numbers of favela inhabitants.20 Within this religious urban landscape, which predominantly expanded throughout the favelas, there also exist various immigrant parishes. In contrast to its Brazilian Pentecostal denominations, who openly agitate and at the same time relate their discourse to the drug

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gangs dominating the favela territories, Congolese churches like the Assembléia de Deus em Bras de Pina do not intervene socially or politically within their neighborhood. Though many of its parishioners live in favelas, the church decided to rent a space in a neighboring district. Congolese migrants consider the favela neighborhoods in which they have to live in war zones between the drug dealers and the police. Parents, in particular, worry that their children could get involved in the drug trade. For many, the church embodies a safe place in two ways: firstly, as a place that is spatially outside but still close to the favela and, thus, accessible; and, secondly, as a space able to give their children both “cognitive strength” and provide a moral paradigm that might help to keep them away from drug dealing, alcohol, or drug abuse. Since the aim of most Congolese migrants is not to stay in Rio but to travel on, they identify more with a globally extended (Congolese) religious network than with their local environment. During our research in Bras de Pina, another dimension of the entanglement between religious and global aspirations became apparent. Four of the seven members of the Congolese church band RDCongo Elembo were hoping to become professional musicians, and the church offered them the opportunity to rehearse and perform in public. Performing regularly in churches and cultural spaces, planning to record their first music album, they made use of Rio’s significant evangelical music industry existing already since the 1990s.21 Within the wide variety of Christian hip-hop, rock, and pop bands, they perform in French, Lingala, Swahili, and Portuguese, using Congolese and Angolan dancing styles as well as Brazilian samba rhythms, thereby seeking to achieve recognition not only in Rio’s music scene but also as African Christian musicians internationally. Their professional ambitions are not primarily associated with Rio specifically: the fact that the city offered them good opportunities to pursue musical careers did not constitute a reason to remain there. Most band members were preparing to continue their journey, whether to Europe or North America. In their research on African Pentecostal musicians in Israel, Galia Sabar and Shlomit Kanari22 have shown that some have managed to become well-known singers among African diasporic communities around the world. African religious music has gained enormous popularity as a commercial genre on a global scale.23 In the transnational market of music, literature, or videos circulating in global revival networks, performers do not have to rely solely on their success in specific locations. A few years after our initial encounter, L. K. Kina journeyed on to Canada with his family. Though not becoming a famous Christian musician, he today sings in his own church, which he founded in Toronto, gathering Congolese and other (African) revival Christians. Upon a closer look, we can observe the interlacing of religion, diasporic networks, transnational mobility, and the aim for success. In a church setting marked by its transiting parishioners, the band makes music in order to praise God. At the same time, however, the musicians, following their aims of becoming professionals, make use of the vivid religious (and secular) music scene in Rio de Janeiro and mix African music styles with Brazilian rhythms. Meanwhile, they prepare for their next migration stage and hope to make use of the musical experiences they gained during their time in Rio on their next migratory stage, the hope being that they would find another revival church with a band they could easily join. In addition, the existence of a diasporic religious music market gives them the confidence that they can further pursue their professional career in their prospective destination. Even though in the Afro-Brazilian- and Pentecostal-influenced favelas of Rio, Congolese have been, unlike in Istanbul, less strongly stigmatized as “the other,” here too social precarity has been prevailing for many of them. Located in a city with a dense Pentecostal urban landscape, the location of the church, outside the favela but still close to it, reflects the special

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role of the church as a distinctive marker of the urban surroundings. This in turn reflects the different position of Congolese in relation to Brazilian believers, as the majority plan to journey on as soon as possible, and hence does not want to interfere but rather stay outside of urban processes within the favelas.

GUANGZHOU—TRADING AND WORSHIPPING IN XIAOBEI As Istanbul, since the beginning of the 2000s, the Chinese trading city of Guangzhou has become increasingly targeted by the Congolese. This followed strengthened political and economic relations between the DR Congo and China, easing visa facilitation, and travel agencies organizing flights and baggage allowances, thus keeping airfare low.24 However, unlike in Istanbul, the primary target of the Congolese here is trading, not the journey on to the Global North. In 2012, approximately half a million Africans were residing in China, with Guangzhou hosting the largest community.25 According to Congolese community leaders, 450 Congolese were living permanently in Guangzhou in 2015, while a much larger number of (suitcase) traders frequently traveled back and forth between Guangzhou and Kinshasa, but also between Guangzhou and Paris, London, Brussels, Luanda, or Melbourne. These traders in general stay between three days and three months. A great number of them are women known as femmes commercantes.26 In addition, many of the residing Congolese are students, of which many work as intermediators for Congolese or other sub-Saharan businessmen coming to Guangzhou. Others have opened up cargo and shipping agencies, with a few of them also seeking to pursue careers as professional soccer players. Predominantly located in or around the urban districts of Xiaobei and Sanyuanli, restaurants, bars, hairdressers, as well as African churches have emerged in the area. Some of the churches have existed for more than a decade, with others established recently. All of them, shipping businesses, restaurants, were not officially registered, but have been known and have been under the surveillance by Chinese authorities.27

L’ÉGLISE DE PUISSANCE Located on the tenth floor in a huge commercial building in Xiaobei, L’Église de Puissance is one of the eight Congolese churches that, in 2015, existed in this neighborhood. While on the first floor retailers were selling clothing, electric devices, and “African drapery,” on the 10th floor the Sunday worship started at 11 a.m. About 100 churchgoers were attending the worship, and the church band, consisting of six women and five men in their twenties, was leading with Christian pop music through the sermon. A Congolese pastor and trader from Kinshasa, who frequently visits the church on his business trips, was preaching: If you are not in dialogue with God, and you are coming to Guangzhou to do business, you will not be successful. You will buy the same T-Shirts as all the others do, and you will return to Kinshasa and will not be able to sell them. This is even though you are praying, but you do not reach the right dialogue with God. Therefore you do not really listen to his advice, and you are buying the wrong articles. Preaching on prosperity and economic and social success are common features of all Congolese revival churches around the globe. However, in the Église de Puissance, the content

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of the sermons is closely adapted to the churchgoer’s reality, that is, the daily business on the local markets. Hence, pastors not only preach the Word of God; their services also instruct the believers on how to make a profit. In this context, the aspiration of moving on, in an economic or geographical sense, fits with new social patterns, practices, and networks of this religious movement. For Pastor Jean Bebe, the head of the church, being a “man of god” and a businessman go hand in hand. In 2005, he arrived in Guangzhou with a business visa, and a few years later, he founded his own church. During his frequent business trips to Brussels or Paris, he preaches the gospel in various churches. In turn, pastors often pay him a visit back to preach at the Église de Puissance in Guangzhou, as well as to buy commodities. As in Istanbul, the church serves as a connecting hub facilitating the mobility of its pastors, as well as of its congregants. However, unlike in Istanbul, the church is almost exclusively filled with merchants, among them many who do petty trade between Guangzhou and Kinshasa, like Helena Okito. Through a pastor of her church back in Kinshasa, she embarked for Guangzhou for the first time in 2012 and has since prolonged her visits from one week to several months. Purchasing predominantly clothing at the cheap wholesales on the outskirts of the city, she has, over the years, enlarged her business activities and became a broker for other Congolese traders. Attending church on Sunday mornings, which she interprets predominantly as a Christian duty, is also a way to gather with other Congolese and to potentially meet new clients.

CONCLUSION Congolese revival churches have expanded globally and contributed to the transformation of the physical and social landscape of the metropolises where they take root. In contrast to their Catholic or Protestant counterparts, revival churches are much easier to form without much formality, official permission, or trained leadership. This means that new churches with new profiles can be easily founded at different stages of migration and adjust in response to the settings in the host societies.28 In addition, due to its high level of abstraction, new charismatic religion is adjustable in a large variety of different contexts without modifying its formal structure. One aspect making Pentecostalism so appealing is that it offers the believers ways to deal with experiences of social change, that is, with continuity and discontinuity. Another appeal, as we established during the research, was their specific way of worshipping, their unique style and music with its sensational affinity,29 which give the believers a special spirituality. Against the background of the revival churches’ flexible adjustment to the respective host context, we showed how in the three metropolises urban spatial structures had an impact on both the “sacred spaces,” as well as on the functions those spaces fulfilled for the believers. Ong and Roy,30 as we discussed earlier, propose “worlding” as an approach to analyze how urban configurations are both locally specific and embedded in global processes and networks. This understanding allowed us to track the dimensions and forms in which a network of Congolese revival Christians expanded globally, while adapting differently to urban and national settings. Drawing on AbdouMaliq Simone, this sophisticated and widely ramified network could also be seen as a process of “worlding from below,” reaching out to a “larger world” through “circuits of migration, resource evacuation, and commodity exchange.”31 Through

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transnational agency, Congolese revival Christians are participating locally in the permanent production of the city, a city that is not defined as a circumstanced territorial unity but rather as a globally connected assemblage of entangled religious, political and social practices, spaces, symbols, and materialities. Religion is one of the multiple vehicles working as an intersection for African urban actors in cities worldwide. In the metropolises examined here, one can observe the settlement of religious, social, and entrepreneurial projects that are broadly connected to a globally outreaching religious engagement. As a religious-urban worlding practice, it transforms and works on inner-city centers, decaying peripheral neighborhoods, as well as larger urban systems. Along these lines, religion is a reference point connecting initiatives, styles, interpretations, and experiences of the believers and offering the bases for resources to a broader scope of options, even under the conditions of discrimination and exclusion.

NOTES 1 Gerda Heck, “Worshipping along the Routes of Migration: Religion as Infrastructure,” Technosphere Magazine (2018), https://www.technosphere-magazine.hkw.de. 2 Stephan Lanz, “Assembling Global Prayers in the City: An Attempt to Repopulate Urban Theory with Religion,” in Global Prayers: Contemporary Manifestations of the Religious in the City, eds. Jochen Becker, Katrin Klingan, Stephan Lanz, and Kathrin Wildner (Zürich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2014), 16–47. 3 Jochen Becker, Katrin Klingan, Stephan Lanz, and Kathrin Wildner, eds., Global Prayers: Contemporary Manifestations of the Religious in the City (Zürich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2014). 4 Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong, eds., Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). 5 Ananya Roy, “The 21st-Century Metropolis: New Geographies of Theory,” Regional Studies 43.6 (2009): 824. 6 Aihwa Ong, “Worlding Cities, or the Art of Being Global,” in Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, eds. Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 4. 7 AbdouMaliq Simone, “On the Worlding of African Cities,” African Studies Review 44.2 (2001): 15–41. 8 Birgit Meyer, “Christianity in Africa: From African Independent to Pentecostal-Charismatic Churches,” Annual Review of Anthropology 33.1 (2004): 447–74. 9 David Garbin, “Symbolic Geographies of the Sacred: Diasporic Territorialization and Charismatic Power in a Transnational Congolese Prophetic Church,” in Traveling Spirits: Migrants, Markets and Mobilities, eds. Gertrud Hüwelmeier and Kristine Krause (London: Routledge, 2010), 145–64. 10 Katrien Pype, “Dancing for God or the Devil: Pentecostal Discourse on Popular Dance in Kinshasa,” Journal of Religion in Africa 36.3/4 (2006): 300. 11 Simon Coleman, The Globalisation of Charismatic Christianity: Spreading the Gospel of Prosperity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 63. 12 Filip De Boeck and Alcinda Honwana, eds., Makers and Breakers: Children and Youth in Postcolonial Africa (Oxford: James Currey, 2005), 1–2. 13 David Garbin and Manuel Vasquez, “God is Technology: Mediating the Sacred in the Congolese Diaspora,” in Migrations, Diaspora and Information Technology in Global Societies, eds. Leopoldina Fortunati, Raul Pertierra, and Jane Vincent (London: Routledge, 2011), 157–71. 14 Étienne Balibar, Sind wir Bürger Europas? Politische Integration, Soziale Ausgrenzung und die Zukunft des Nationalen (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2003), and Gerda Heck, “‘It’s Been the Best Journey of My Life’: Governing Migration and Strategies of Migrants at Europe’s Borders: Morocco,” in Crossing and Controlling Borders: Immigration Policies and Their Impact on Migrants’

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Journeys, eds. Mechtild Baumann, Astrid Lorenz, and Kerstin Rosenow (Opladen: Budrich Uni Press, 2011), 73–86. 15 Heck, “‘It’s Been the Best Journey of My Life.’” 16 Kelly T. Brewer and Deniz Yükseker, “A Survey on African Migrants and Asylum Seekers in Istanbul,” in Land of Diverse Migrations: Challenges of Emigration and Immigration in Turkey, eds. Ahmet Içduygu and Kemal Kirişci (Istanbul: Bilgi University Press, 2009), 637–20. 17 José H. Fischel de Andrade and Adriana Marcolini, “Brazil’s Refugee Act: Model Refugee Law for Latin America,” Forced Migration Review 12.13 (2002): 37–9. 18 Maria Regina Petrus Tannuri, Refugiados Congoleses no Rio de Janeiro e Dinâmicas de “Integração Local”: Das Ações Institucionais e Políticas Públicas aos Recursos Relacionais das Redes Sociais (PhD diss., Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, 2010), 181. 19 IBGE—Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística, “Censo 2010: Número de Católicos cai e Aumenta o de Evangélicos, Espíritas e sem Religião,” 2012, https://censo2010.ibge.gov.br/noticiascenso.html. 20 Patrícia Birman and Márcia Pereira Leite, “Whatever Happened to What Used to Be the Largest Catholic Country in the World?” Daedalos 129.2 (2000): 278. 21 Martijn Oosterbaan, Divine Mediations: Pentecostalism, Politics and Mass Media in a Favela in Rio de Janeiro (PhD thesis, University of Amsterdam, 2006). 22 Galia Sabar and Shlomit Kanari, “‘I’m Singing My Way Up’: The Significance of Music amongst African Christian Migrants in Israel,” Studies in World Christianity 12.2 (2006): 101–25. 23 Kyle Devine, “The Popularity of Religious Music and the Religiosity of Popular Music,” Scottish Music Review 2.1 (2011): 11. 24 Lesley Nicole Braun, “Wandering Women: The Work of Congolese Transnational Traders,” Africa 89.2 (2019): 385. 25 Adams Bodomo, “African Soft Power in China,” African – East African Affairs 1–2 (2015): 76–97. 26 Braun, “Wandering Women.” 27 Heidi Østbø Haugen, “African Pentecostal Migrants in China: Marginalization and the Alternative Geography of a Mission Theology,” African Studies Review 56.1 (2013): 81–102. 28 Ogbu U. Kalu, “African Pentecostalism in Diaspora,” PentecoStudies: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Research on the Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements 9.1 (2010): 32. 29 Birgit Meyer, “Introduction: From Imagined Communities to Aesthetic Formations: Religious Mediations, Sensational Forms, and Styles of Binding,” in Aesthetic Formations: Media, Religion, and the Senses, ed. Birgit Meyer (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 1–30. 30 Roy and Ong, Worlding Cities. 31 Simone, “On the Worlding of African Cities,” 15.

WORKS CITED Balibar, Étienne. Sind wir Bürger Europas? Politische Integration, Soziale Ausgrenzung und die Zukunft des Nationalen. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2003. Becker, Jochen, Katrin Klingan, Stephan Lanz, and Kathrin Wildner, eds. Global Prayers: Contemporary Manifestations of the Religious in the City. Zürich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2014. Birman, Patrícia, and Márcia Pereira Leite. “Whatever Happened to What Used to be the Largest Catholic Country in the World?” Daedalos 129.2 (2000): 271–91. Bodomo, Adams Bodomo. “African Soft Power in China.” African – East African Affairs 1–2 (2015): 76–97. Braun, Lesley Nicole. “Wandering Women: The Work of Congolese Transnational Traders.” Africa 89.2 (2019): 378–97. Brewer, Kelly T., and Deniz Yükseker. “A Survey on African Migrants and Asylum Seekers in Istanbul.” In Land of Diverse Migrations: Challenges of Emigration and Immigration in Turkey. Eds. Ahmet Içduygu and Kemal Kirişci. Istanbul: Bilgi University Press, 2009. 637–720.

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Coleman, Simon. The Globalisation of Charismatic Christianity: Spreading the Gospel of Prosperity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. de Boeck, Filip. “La Ville de Kinshasa: Une Architecture du Verbe.” Eurozine netmagazine, 2007. http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2007-05-25-deboeck-fr.html. de Boeck, Filip, and Alcinda Honwana, eds. Makers and Breakers: Children and Youth in Postcolonial Africa. Oxford: James Currey, 2005. Devine, Kyle. “The Popularity of Religious Music and the Religiosity of Popular Music.” Scottish Music Review 2.1 (2011): 1–19. Fischel de Andrade, José H., and Adriana Marcolini. “Brazil’s Refugee Act: Model Refugee Law for Latin America.” Forced Migration Review 12.13 (2002): 37–9. Garbin, David. “Symbolic Geographies of the Sacred: Diasporic Territorialization and Charismatic Power in a Transnational Congolese Prophetic Church.” In Traveling Spirits: Migrants, Markets and Mobilities. Eds. Gertrud Hüwelmeier and Kristine Krause. London: Routledge, 2010. 145–64. Garbin, David, and Manuel Vasquez. “God is Technology: Mediating the Sacred in the Congolese Diaspora.” In Migrations, Diaspora and Information Technology in Global Societies. Eds. Leopoldina Fortunati, Raul Pertierra, and Jane Vincent. London: Routledge, 2011. 157–71. Heck, Gerda. “‘It’s Been the Best Journey of My Life’: Governing Migration and Strategies of Migrants at Europe’s Borders: Morocco.” In Crossing and Controlling Borders: Immigration Policies and their Impact on Migrants’ Journeys. Eds. Mechtild Baumann, Astrid Lorenz, and Kerstin Rosenow. Opladen: Budrich Uni Press, 2011. 73–86. Heck, Gerda. “Worshipping Along the Routes of Migration: Religion as Infrastructure.” Technosphere Magazine, 2018. https://www.technosphere-magazine.hkw.de. IBGE—Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística. “Censo 2010: Número de Católicos cai e Aumenta o de Evangélicos, Espíritas e sem Religião,” 2012. https://censo2010.ibge.gov.br/noticiascenso.html. Kalu, Ogbu U. “African Pentecostalism in Diaspora.” PentecoStudies: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Research on the Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements 9.1 (2010): 9–34. Lanz, Stephan. “Assembling Global Prayers in the City: An Attempt to Repopulate Urban Theory with Religion.” In Global Prayers: Contemporary Manifestations of the Religious in the City. Eds. Jochen Becker, Katrin Klingan, Stephan Lanz, and Kathrin Wildner. Zürich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2014. 16–47. Meyer, Birgit. “Christianity in Africa: From African Independent to Pentecostal-Charismatic Churches.” Annual Review of Anthropology 33.1 (2004): 447–74. Meyer, Birgit. “Introduction: From Imagined Communities to Aesthetic Formations: Religious Mediations, Sensational Forms, and Styles of Binding.” In Aesthetic Formations: Media, Religion, and the Senses. Ed. Birgit Meyer. New York: Palgrave, 2009. 1–30. Ong, Aihwa. “Worlding Cities, or the Art of Being Global.” In Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global. Eds. Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. 1–26. Oosterbaan, Martijn. Divine Mediations: Pentecostalism, Politics and Mass Media in a Favela in Rio de Janeiro. PhD Thesis. University of Amsterdam, 2006. Østbø Haugen, Heidi. “African Pentecostal Migrants in China: Marginalization and the Alternative Geography of a Mission Theology.” African Studies Review 56.1 (2013): 81–102. Pype, Katrien. “Dancing for God or the Devil: Pentecostal Discourse on Popular Dance in Kinshasa.” Journal of Religion in Africa 36.3/4 (2006): 296–318. Roy, Ananya. “The 21st-Century Metropolis: New Geographies of Theory.” Regional Studies 43.6 (2009): 819–30. Roy, Ananya, and Aihwa Ong, eds. Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. Sabar, Galia, and Shlomit Kanari. “‘I’m Singing My Way Up’: The Significance of Music amongst African Christian Migrants in Israel.” Studies in World Christianity 12.2 (2006): 101–25. Simone, AbdouMaliq. For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2004. Simone, AbdouMaliq. “The Last Shall Be the First: African Urbanites and the Larger Urban world.” In Other Cities, Other Worlds. Ed. Andreas Huyssen. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. 99–119.

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Simone, AbdouMaliq. “On the Worlding of African Cities.” African Studies Review 44. 2 (2001): 15–41. Simone, AbdouMaliq. “Visible and Invisible. Remaking Cities in Africa.” In Under Siege. Four African Cities, Freetown, Johannesburg, Kinshasa, Lagos. Documenta & O. Enwezor. Eds., Documenta 11, Platform 4. Ostfildern, 2002. 23–43. Tannuri, Maria Regina Petrus. Refugiados Congoleses no Rio de Janeiro e Dinâmicas de “Integração Local”: Das Ações Institucionais e Políticas Públicas aos Recursos Relacionais das Redes Sociais. PhD dissertation. Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, 2010.

PART TWO

Social and Behavioral Sciences

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CHAPTER TWELVE

Worlding Sociology VERONIKA WITTMANN

Sociology has a long-standing love affair with the nation-state. The rise of the discipline began with the emergence of the nation-state and nationalism. In the face of the refocusing of fields, methodologies, and vocabularies on the world, sociology is confronted with an often non-reflective nation-state paradigm and a state-centric vocabulary, which opposes the perception of the world as a perspective. In this chapter, I examine what the term world  accomplishes in sociology. I do so by raising the question of what happens when the world concept is appended to a particular form of sociological inquiry. Theories or theoretical models that allow the concept of world to function in a meaningful way with that knowledge domain can be considered as approaches of world society. Furthermore, here I investigate how the term “worlding” bears on the theoretical knowledge and the future of sociology. The concept “worlding sociology” reminds sociologists of the fact that in contemporary times, they have to look at the world as one common ground. Any research on social structures, processes, and relations in the twenty-first century has to take into account that the global age requires stepping out of the national or continental container. A clear orientation toward the world is an indispensable requirement emanating from social reality in current times. The chapter closes with an outlook on the visionary claims of a global turn of the human sciences, and I also present here sociology’s contributions toward this undertaking. With regard to world sociology, it has to be discussed what exactly can be classified under this concept. The term world sociology indicates two different aspects. First, it points to the question of the worldwide scope of sociology. The terms being used in sociology to categorize and understand the world are a relevant issue here. Another topic concerns the matter of how the discipline itself is set up regarding worldwide orientation, including the question of who is participating in discourse. Furthermore, aspects of labeling sociology as world sociology, including the issue of universality of knowledge, would have to be illustrated. Second, one has to look at the content of world sociology. Accordingly, subject matters being discussed within the academic discipline that contribute to the content of world sociology are presented along with sociological models that provide insights into concepts about the world. Various approaches ranging from globalization discourses and research on transnationalism to conceptualizations of world society are outlined as well. As diverse as they are, they have all made contributions to the content of world sociology. In light of the refocusing of fields, methodologies, and vocabularies on the world and regarding the worldwide scope of sociology, one cannot disregard the roots of the academic discipline. When considering the history of sociology since its establishment as an academic discipline, a clear focus on research on the industrialized parts of the world can be found. The first university chairs were established in Europe and North America, and large parts

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of academic literature were dealing with social implications resulting from the beginning of industrialization in these world regions. Furthermore, over decades sociologists concentrated on theoretical and empirical research in given nation-states. Empirical research, in particular, became a guide of sorts for governmental social policy in countries of the Global North. Even during the rise of globalization at the beginning of the 1990s, sociologists were latecomers in participating in academic discussions. Sociology is probably the last discipline to realize the societal changes due to globalization processes. Whereas all other disciplines have assumed a new global reality, sociology has taken the view that “in principle nothing has changed and globalization is just the spread of modernity,” as Martin Albrow stated.1 Although academics— from business, economics, political science, cultural studies, and others —have long been quite actively focusing on inter- and transnational issues and the world scale, sociologists came late to the realization that the globe also has to be an important area of research. One reason for their world-blindness can be seen in the fact that there has been no long tradition within the academic discipline of perceiving the world as an area of interest. While, for example, researchers from political science have also been focusing on international or world politics as an important part of their work ever since its establishment as an academic discipline, sociology has never had this orientation. On the contrary, one can find even in contemporary textbooks the statement that sociologists primarily have to deal with the industrialized parts of the world.2 As such, all areas of the globe that are not categorized as industrialized states or regions are considered to be of no significance to sociologists. In this parochial perception of the main focus of sociologists, regions in the Global South are specifically excluded from being an area of research and are ceded to anthropologists or ethnologists. At the same time, this narrow comprehension of the focal inquiry point of sociologists also ignores specific fields of the academic discipline, which always had the Global South as a main area of research: parts of cultural sociology and development sociology. As a particular field, the latter has contributed largely to the worldwide scope of sociology and, as such, to the content of world sociology due to the fact that it is scholars specializing in this area who highlighted the connection between the so-called developed and the so-called developing regions of the world, among other issues. Development sociologists concentrated either on topics relating to the Global South or specific world regions like Africa, Latin America, or Asia, or they pointed out the interdependencies between the Global North and the Global South, and their perceived transcontinental connections. When discussing world sociology, specific terms being used by researchers for describing and categorizing the world also have to be taken into account. In sociology, specifically during the decades of the bipolar world order, scholars subdivided the world into three levels: the first world (the West), the second world (the socialist countries), and the third world.3 Its substantial characteristics were determined by the economic and political arrangements of the states that constituted the international system. From a history of sciences perspective, it was the demographer Alfred Sauvy who first coined the term “third world” in 1952.4 This concept referred to countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and as such represented the predominant majority of the states of the world during the period after the Second World War. In particular after the decolonialization processes in Africa and Asia in the 1960s, the concept third world had a positive connotation, relating to the Tiers État of the French revolution. Numerous former colonies wanted to emphasize their specific position in the economic world-system, as well as their political intent not to be dependent on either the Soviet Union or the United States, by embracing the term third world.

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These dynamics of realpolitik on a worldwide scale also left its footprints on the human sciences. The so-called third world gained recognition as an independent field of research and teaching. In the 1960s, specifically after 1968, a large number of new departments specializing in development issues were established at universities all over the globe.5 As such, scholars as well as media and politicians used the concepts of first, second, and third world to categorize and illustrate the economic and political system of the world in the decades after the Second World War. This division of the world into three levels by development researchers lasted up to the end of the bipolar world order. It was the historic year 1989 with its fundamental changes in the political map of the world that also led to the questioning of the use of this global categorization. The beginning of a post-Cold War global order implicated the demise of the so-called second world as an ideological bloc, whereas it continued to exist as a “developing” world sui generis. Simultaneously with the disappearance of the second world at the political level, the concept third world was also questioned. It was shortly after the demise of the bipolar world order that Ulrich Menzel proclaimed the end of the third world and bade goodbye to a false term by stating that there had actually never been a homogeneous third world.6 Indeed, one can argue that there has never been a homogeneous third world with common interests, but rather a diffuse solidarity of several states in Africa, Asia, and Latin America against the West. Discourses about the use of the terms first, second, and third world in general and their substitution by the terms Global North and Global South began in development sociology. By the last decade of the twentieth century, more civil society organizations as well as institutions were operating globally, and more people were thinking globally. In the course of this trend, topics like human rights, feminism, and environmentalism became universal forces, which assisted the crystallization of a global semantic realm. In that field, states as well as people related to a broader sense of humanity itself. Globalization debates in academia started, and the term global began to be perceived as an independent area for research and teaching, opening up the way to the establishment of new academic domains like global studies.7 On the basis of the focus of their research on world regions that were not covered by other sociologists—who mainly analyzed social structures, processes, and relations in industrialized parts of the world—development sociologists can be labeled as pioneer researchers that contributed largely to topics of world sociology. In the decades from the 1960s onward, development sociologists represented in their work a “different” form of sociology. Their analyses on the first, second, and third world, as well as the interdependencies of these different socioeconomic and different world regions, were an extensive foundation for globalization discussions starting largely in the 1990s. Whereas the year 1989 marked a turning point for sociology and left its footprints in scientific debates—the spirit of one world and globalization discourses started—contemporary sociological discussions quite often reflect upon the reverse trend. It is not so much the path of global orientation but the return of states to nationalist solo efforts that shapes contemporary sociological research. The decades after the beginning of the new millennium have been influenced by the fact that now “nationalism is globalizing,” as Colin Crouch has stated.8 The shift toward nationalism politically and the changing of global actors in world politics and world economics have characterized sociological discourses in the last two decades. Specifically, the economic and political rise of China has transformed the balance of power worldwide. Accordingly, Le Monde Diplomatique published a world map in which North America, Australia and New Zealand, Europe, and Japan are already labeled as “old empires.”9 Although this map demonstrates the major power shifts currently taking

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place in the world, in many cases the concepts that scientists use to categorize the world still reflect times gone by. In this respect, there is a discourse among academics about the issue of old terms relating to new worlds.10 The post-2000 period has also been characterized by global threats like climate change, financial crisis, and transnational terrorism.11 On the one hand, these global dangers have led to global commonalities, but on the other hand, the emerging contours and now the rapid proliferation of a renewed nationalism can also be observed around the world. Regarding development sociology, the terms first, second, and third world have been substituted by the concepts Global South and Global North in research in the recent past. There is an academic debate about the question of whether the new terms are adequate to analyze and categorize the world. The new concepts Global South and Global North are vague “umbrella” notions that do not sufficiently reflect the heterogeneity of the worlds they are meant to signify. It has been argued de facto that there exists a Global South as well as a Global North within each region of the world. The discussion of terminology can highlight the importance for academics to rethink what it means to employ adequate lexicons while studying and characterizing the contemporary world. Although all these concepts, whether old or new, are just attributions, one benefit of the terms first, second, and third world is that they highlight more common characteristics among the countries labeled by these designations. In academic discourse, researchers depend on terms to structure and categorize reality. As such, concepts are essential for scientists for comprehending the world. As a result, sociologists still have to debate the adequacy of terms for categorizing and understanding the world in the twenty-first century. Taking the history of sociology into account, one can state that although the beginning of sociology’s establishment as an academic discipline is defined by an international orientation of sociologists, the decades of the bipolar world order saw the rise of nation-state-related paradigms in sociology, with the prominent exception of the work being done by development sociologists. Empirical sociologists especially contributed to the nation-state focus of sociology during the Cold War. After 1989, the discussion of international processes turns to global issues. The first decades of the millennium reflect the reverse trend of “the globalization backlash,” sociologists having to consider the current processes of re-nationalization in large parts of the world.12 At the same time, it is more evident than ever before—as we are faced with the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020—that humanity is confronted with enormous global challenges and risks in this century. So, the main task of sociologists nowadays is to include global issues concerning humanity in their analyses. When discussing the aspects of labeling sociology as world sociology, one has to reflect about the worldwide orientation of the discipline as well as its institutionalization and representation, which has to do with the scholars’ background itself.13 A world sociology in the literal sense of the world must make the claim to represent all regions of the world and has to be clearly diverse with respect to geographical aspects. Seventy-five percent of humanity lives in Africa and Asia, so a world sociology worth its name would have to take research from these continents into account. So far, when looking at the institutionalization of sociology and the opportunities of African and Asian scholars to participate in academic discourse, sociology has a long way to go before it can be labeled world sociology. In a similar vein, in contemporary sociological textbooks for students, topics of world sociology are not highly represented. Some scholars see the point that theories of “dead, white men of the Northern hemisphere” are predominately presented therein. This fact reflects the origin of the establishment of the sociological discipline in Europe and North America.14 Additionally,

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world sociology has to deal with the question of the universality of sociological knowledge. This aspect ties into the debate on whether sociological findings from one part of the world can be labeled as universal knowledge or whether there can only be regional, nation-state, or local-related knowledge. So, there is an entire conversation around the claim of universal sociological knowledge versus a claim of this knowledge being only regional.15 Furthermore, the content of world sociology relates to research topics being discussed in sociology, which have dealt with the world. In the last decades, there have been concepts and models developed that have a worldwide frame of reference. Fields that have contributed to concepts about the world—and as such have expanded the content of world sociology— include various approaches ranging from globalization studies to research on transnationalism to conceptualizations of world society. Sociological scholarship that has participated in the setup of world sociology also comprises globalization discourses16 as well as conceptualizations of world society.17 Also, specific topics of research having the globe or global as its purview belong here, such as work on global cities,18 the global age,19 examinations of global society,20 and so on. Studies of transnational social spaces21 also fall under the category of worldspanning sociological work. When they address globalization, sociologists label the social transformation of lives resulting from globalization processes “The Runaway World”22 or “The McDonaldization of Society”23 or tag the current period as “liquid modernity,”24 “entangled modernity,”25 or “second modernity.” While the “first modernity” was determined by the ordering principle of the nation-state, with a clear distinction between the internal and the external and where territories, identities, and also to a large extent societies were defined, it is defined, it is typical of the “second modernity” that society is no longer tantamount to the nation-state, but it is transnational and cosmopolitan.26 In this respect, the still-popular binding of the term society to the nation-state is an ongoing knowledge blocker that hampers the appropriate analysis and perception of global interdependencies. Aside from all of these concerns with globalization and transnationalism, sociological research that focuses specifically on analyses of society in a worldwide context—conceptualizations of world society—is of distinct interest to world sociology. These theoretical and empirical models allow the concept of world to function in a meaningful way within that knowledge domain when the concept is appended to a particular form of sociological inquiry. The term society is the heart of the sociological discipline, so the combination of world and society— world society—is of substantial interest for research topics considering the content of world sociology. Concerning the usage, significance, and value of the term society, it can be noted that the concept world society, in comparison to the term globalization—as well as contrary to world-systems concepts—emphasizes the realm of society at the center of inquiry. It is precisely in this interconnection of world and society that lies the crucial difference between world sociology and other approaches to globalization. The common denominator of all the various conceptualizations of world society is a worldwide system that is imagined as a unit. This entity is being designated as a society. In general, the concept of world society refers to a teaching and research area in sociology that interacts closely with neighboring disciplines like philosophy (social philosophy, political philosophy) and political science (international relations). As such, there exists a variety of approaches in social sciences and humanities to the term. Numerous scholarly works on world society have come from political scientists and researchers of international relations. Systems theory, cosmopolitanism, as well as world-polity research can be mentioned here too, specifically as they relate to sociological approaches to world society. World-System

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analysis,27 however, would not fall under this category as Immanuel Wallerstein28 and others rejected the term “society.” World-systems theories are based on the primacy of the capitalist world economy and as such do not reflect upon the term “society” in general and also oppose the idea of world society. The notion of an already existing world society is also repudiated by scholars of the realistic school of international relations, and so is the idea of global governance or the vision of a world state, to which the debate of world society, particularly among political philosophers, largely leads.29 Here, the term world society is fundamentally dismissed and labeled as idealistic. Researchers from political science and international relations deal with the growing interdependence of nation state-organized societies and reflect on the emergence of a transnational networked civil society. Based on their empirical results, however, they assume at most the emergence of a world society. Consequently, the transformation of world politics after the end of the bipolar world order resulted in the emerging of a new triad of “A World of States, an Economic World, and a Societal World,”30 but not in a world society. As such, the concept of world society is regarded as suggesting a not-yet-existing world society. There are also approaches that use the term world society as an additional layer to “national societies,” so the concept is frequently employed in connection with the nation-state.31 Quite a different use of the term world society has been developed in systems theory, based on Niklas Luhmann’s work. In this tradition of thought, world society as a conceptual innovation is outlined as a European idea dating back to the eighteenth century. As such, it relates to the development of a European system of states in the early modern period.32 When the term world society is understood to be the “comprehensive system of human society,” society can simply be imagined as forming uniformly around the world.33 The implications of this understanding of the concept of society itself (e.g., neglecting the conventional characteristics of social cohesion and political constitution) are highly controversial and are fiercely debated in sociology. As such, the term world society is quite a contentious one, and the reservations the “society” component of the concept has already encountered cannot be overlooked. This overview of different approaches to world society in social sciences and humanities demonstrates that it is a term that allows a wide range of social-theoretical assumptions and therefore eludes a simple definition. Nevertheless, this controversial concept can be categorized into different schools of thought.34 In any event, world society is a concept that has been dealt with both theoretically—analytically and normatively—as well as empirically in sociology. Although the discourse on world society has differentiated to a large extent ever since it started, three basic components of all approaches related to it can be detected that have remained significant up to the present: first, the multiplicity of conceptualizations assuming an emerging world society; second, the notion that the nation-state and regional societies remain legitimate analysis units; and third, the central assumption of the singularity of world society proclaimed by researchers of systems theory. In terms of the theoretical models underlying them, these world-society-based approaches can be classified as follows: 1. Numerous sociologists favor approaches to a formative, emergent world society in the empirically verifiable compression of transnational interactions in a “post-national constellation.”35 The fundamental idea in their analysis is that, social-cum-concomitant globalizing homogenization notwithstanding, the substantial prerequisites for a social formation (which would merit the name “society”) are social integration and cohesion. Consequently, in their understanding, world society does not yet exist. Societies exist

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only in plural form. In these approaches, the term “world society” implies an emergent world society. 2. The concept of world ethics, based on the idea of the universality of human rights, is for some sociologists the main reference point for their analyses of world society. Immanuel Kant’s notion of “world citizenship” forms the basis for these cosmopolitan approaches.36 For example, Ulrich Beck conceptualized the model of a “world risk society” whose risk diversification no society is able to detract from anymore. In this line of inquiry, the term “world society” is used as an additional superstructure.37 Sociologists from world-polity research, whose basic idea is the worldwide diffusion of institutional patterns, work not only theoretically, but also empirically on world society. The global diffusion of an institutional pattern is a fundamental element in this neo-institutionalist model.38 The term “world society” is applied as an additional level. 3. A third class includes what I would call “stratificatory” conceptualizations of world society. Within this category, world society is designed as a global field of interaction. See, for example, Peter Heinz, who puts the issue of the internationalization of inequality at the center of his work.39 Here, the pivotal assumption is the formation of a global stratification system after the Second World War. This system is built in accordance with the concept of development, so that all people and states worldwide are included in this field of activity. In this situation, “world society” functions solely as an umbrella term for covering the different nation state-related analyses. 4. Under a fourth rubric and based on the groundwork and analyses of Niklas Luhmann, systems theory marks a radical break with the four sociological approaches mentioned above.40 Researchers here assume basically only a single form of society across the globe: world society. This is envisioned as the most comprehensive context of human coexistence, accommodating all social processes and figurations within it. Systemstheory sociologists presume, following Luhmann, that world society already exists, and indeed in the singular and not the plural of partial worlds.41 This core thesis of the singularity of world society implies a radical shift away from the plural concept of society. Here, the concept of “world society” is used for an existent world society and designates a singular form of society. Despite this diversity of theoretical assumptions and empirical findings, however, all conceptualizations on world society agree in principle that a thorough analysis of the processes of societal change requires the recourse to a global context. This means not least overcoming methodological nationalism.42 For both social science theory and empirical research methods consider the handling of global structures, processes, and relations one of the most complex scientific challenges of current times. In addition, the label society for the unit that is being imagined as a worldwide system combines three sociological conceptualizations of world society illustrated in the classification above. The assumption of such a system that is imagined as an entity and thus identifying the latter as a society applies to the system-theoretical, the cosmopolitan, as well as the world-polity approaches of world society. All these three models factually conceptualize world society as an object with its own internal logic. World society is thus not the sum of its parts—for example, of financial markets or nation-states—but goes way beyond that. Tying into this argument are assumptions that are, even today, not self-evident in

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sociology. A case in point is the sociological macro-category of society, which is not bounded to the territorial unity of a nation-state and, as such, is not spatially conceptualized. When one looks at the roots of the sociological discipline and takes into account that sociology does not have a long tradition of dealing with global issues, world society presents the picture of a discipline that has only partially considered the world as a perspective for research. It is more a mosaic with specific fields like development sociology or world society approaches that allow the concept of the world to function in a meaningful way in sociological knowledge around the world. In turn, the term worlding bears on theoretical knowledge and the future of sociology in various ways. The concept of worlding sociology can be defined as a sociology facing the world. The point of acknowledging contemporary global issues is relevant here. A worlding sociology has to deal with global reality both theoretically—analytically and normatively—and empirically. Further development of substantial themes of world sociology is essential for this agenda. In addition, worlding sociology trends in the twenty-first century, as well as cross-disciplinary pathways and cross-continental exchanges have to be outlined. In short: worlding sociology is about the perception of global reality with regard to socioeconomic, political, cultural, and technological aspects. There are numerous global challenges facing humanity in this century. A worlding sociology has to take them into account and contribute with profound expertise to academic discussions. To achieve this goal, worlding sociology needs to build on the conceptual traditions and approaches of world sociology. Any nation state-related or disciplinary solo efforts will not provide adequate answers to how humanity can manage and cope with the global risks of the twenty-first century. The working principles or prerequisites for a worlding sociology can be highlighted on the basis of a list of criteria as follows: 1. A worlding sociology has to orient itself on a given social reality. This reality is generated in the twenty-first century by global and digital dynamics. 2. There has to be an alignment toward the world as a framework for sociological inquiries. At this point, worlding sociology can build upon a theoretical and empirical groundwork, on models and conceptualizations of a world sociology for which the world already functions as the main focal point and reference frame of research. 3. From a normative standpoint, a worlding sociology has to offer insights into global human experiences. Such insights could be provided by attending to topics such as the connectivity of all people and research on ethical matters, human rights, their universality, as well as global risks.43 4. A worlding sociology has to recognize the simultaneity of homogenization and heterogenization processes in the social life of people. Besides the fact that there are global processes of isomorphism taking place, the world and its people remain diverse also. This should not be viewed as a contradiction but as an incentive for worlding sociology to elaborate on unity in diversity. 5. Also, a worlding sociology has to analyze global consciousness as a worldwide experience of people. Globality is a given reality of human beings and should be taken into account for future sociological research. 6. A worlding sociology has to deal with world-spanning social and political structures, processes, and relations. For example, transnational civil society organizations are increasingly highly influential and significant actors in world politics; there is also an increasing political power shift taking place in world politics; and states are no longer the only players in this field.

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  7. A worlding sociology has to be capable of documenting contradictions and discordances of social reality in a global context.   8. A worlding sociology has to collect empirical data attesting to the global age. This implies turning away from methodological nationalism in empirical research and a shift toward methodological cosmopolitanism44 or other empirical research methods that are adequate to cover worldwide phenomena.45   9. A worlding sociology has to adjust to the digital age. Technological changes are having an enormous influence on humanity in this century. Digital information and communication technologies as well as artificial intelligence change social structures, processes, and relations in a profound and sustainable way. Working spheres, politics,46 and people are altering due to consumer habits, social life relations, and human interactions are altering due to technological innovations. 10. A worlding sociology has to actively participate in the global turn in the human sciences. Cross-disciplinary research is essential to contemporary academia and part and parcel of the global turn in the human sciences. As one can see, a worlding sociology has to perform wide-ranging tasks. It can partly build on the preliminary work of globalization studies and on research on transnationalism, as well as on models and conceptualizations of world society. At the same time, it is evident from this extensive list that profound scientific expertise can only take place by cross-disciplinary research. Worlding sociology also requires a stepping out of the national or regional container for social inquiry. Conceptualizations of world sociology can be a useful foundation for that and for pursuing the agenda of discussing global realities and challenges in a profound way. Both world sociology and worlding sociology contribute to a global turn in the human sciences, which is a hallmark of our era. The visionary claims of a global turn in the humanities and sociology’s contributions toward this undertaking by considering the discipline’s development trends in the twentyfirst century are based on the following three assumptions: 1. The challenges for humanity in the twenty-first century are enormous. Global crises shape human life all over the world. Global challenges and crises require innovative, cross-disciplinary, and transnational spaces and also point to the need for global cooperation given that no academic discipline alone can cope with them.47 By virtue of its world sociology element, and specifically as world risk society, and, at the same time, by implementing worlding sociology principles and thus overcoming methodological nationalism, sociology can contribute its vast expertise to this universal academic undertaking. 2. Rapid technological changes are already causing, as noted, substantial transformation of human life in this century. At the same time, technological alterations and changes, as well as risks associated with digitalization taking place on a global scale are also shaping the practice of sociology. 3. The sciences are key players in developing a global plan for humanity. Global risks themselves that affect all people, as well as the resulting social, political, cultural, and economic crises are universal problems. Information and knowledge about dealing with global crises must be shared globally by scientists. Science must provide expertise to a world society and world politics confronted with global crisis. The research ground for a global turn in the human sciences has to be built on the Aristotelian axiom that says “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” Scholarly inquiry has to focus

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on concepts of transnational similarities that all people in the world share and has to discuss how nation-states and world-regional borders have lost some of their relevance for global actors. This also applies to scholars. Stepping across traditional discipline boundaries, in the spirit of Aristotle’s principle, is a necessity of the global and digital age. It is not so much that a global turn in the human sciences would require different disciplines to merge; it is just that their distinct origins no longer matters as it has so far. Digital information, communication technologies, and artificial intelligence are essential tools for the future development of world society and the shaping of global politics. It is therefore time for sociology to stop its love affair with the nation-state and to once again embrace the world as an area of research. Only by doing so can it effectively contribute to a global turn in the human sciences. Research in cross-disciplinary, innovative, and transnational academic spaces can make significant contributions in the global and digital age by fostering a new comprehension of science—an understanding of science that is open to facing the challenges of a humanity confronted with global risks, transnational similarities, and rapid technological changes and that follows a scientific approach that develops concepts and forges discourses on the social, economic, cultural, and political shaping of the world and the digital empowerment of today’s citizens. What is needed in this century to give adequate answers to the challenging questions of humanity is an effective completion of the global turn in the sciences. This will be no easy task, but it is the sciences’ most promising way of offering humanity their profound expertise in this era.

NOTES 1 Martin Albrow, “Auf dem Weg zu einer globalen Gesellschaft?” in Perspektiven der Weltgesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1998), 423. 2 See Anthony Giddens, Christian Fleck, and Marianne Egger de Campo, Soziologie (Graz-Wien: Nausner & Nausner Verlag, 2009), 54. 3 The world has been sometimes even divided into four levels. Development sociologists added the category of the fourth world to address the differentiation among the so-called third world countries. The term fourth world referred to all states in the world in which severe socioeconomic conditions prevailed. 4 Alfred Sauvy, “Trois mondes, une planète,” L’Observateur, August 14, 1952. 5 At the same time and also resulting from this change, books featuring the concept third world in their titles have been published. See, for example, John Ernest Goldthorpe, The Sociology of the Third World: Disparity and Involvement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). Several journals focusing on development research have also appeared, and while some of these journals have changed their names and relinquished the term, the Third World Quarterly has retained its original title to the present day. See Third World Quarterly, https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ ctwq20/current (July 12, 2019). 6 Ulrich Menzel, Das Ende der Dritten Welt und das Scheitern der großen Theorie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1992). 7 Global studies—already institutionalized at various universities all over the world and also having a Global Studies Consortium at its disposal—can be a prototype of the essential global turn of the human sciences in the twenty-first century. See Global Studies Consortium, https:// globalstudiesconsortium.org/ (May 5, 2020). 8 Colin Crouch, in Zeit Online, https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2017-02/globalisierung-widerstandrechte-nationalismus-donald-trump-marine-le-pen-is/komplettansicht?print (February 11, 2017). 9 This map shows the BRIC states of Brazil, Russia, India, and China as the powers of the near future and puts the so-called Asian egg, representing two-thirds of the world’s population, in the center of the illustration. Western Europe and North America are now, after having been viewed for a long

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time as the main global actors in politics and economics, already being categorized as empires of the past. See, for the map, Le Monde Diplomatique 2012, https://blog.mondediplo.net/2013-12-22Cartes-en-colere (September 6, 2019). 10 See the discussion in Veronika Wittmann, Old Terms and New Worlds: Challenges for Global Studies in the 21st Century. In global-e. 21st Century Global Dynamics 12.41 (2019), https:// www.21global.ucsb.edu/global-e/september-2019/old-terms-and-new-worlds-challenges-globalstudies-21st-century (May 10, 2020). 11 In the context of world sociology, Ulrich Beck conceptualized a world risk society where humanity is confronted with three main global risks: environmental and financial hazards, as well as transnational terrorism. See Ulrich Beck, World at Risk (Cambridge: Polity, 2008). 12 Colin Crouch, The Globalization Backlash (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018). 13 Regarding this aspect, sociological associations can be interpreted as the highest form of institutionalization of academic research. There exist, at a world level, the International Sociological Association (ISA), founded in 1949 under the auspices of UNESCO, and at regional levels, for example, the European Sociological Association (ESA), as well as numerous sociological associations at a nation-state level. 14 Dirk Kaesler, in Aktuelle Theorien der Soziologie. Von Shmuel N. Eisenstadt bis zur Postmoderne (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 2005), 14. 15 See the discussion in Dirk Kaesler, in Klassiker der Soziologie. Von Auguste Comte bis Alfred Schütz (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 2006), 17f. 16 See, among many others, Martin Albrow and Elisabeth King, Globalization, Knowledge, and Society (London: Sage, 1990); Roland Robertson, Global Modernities (London: Sage, 1995); Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences: Themes for the 21st Century (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998); Ulrich Beck, What Is Globalization? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999); Saskia Sassen, A Sociology of Globalization (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007); Frank J. Lechner, Globalization: The Making of World Society (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009); George Rizer and Atalay Zeynep, Readings in Globalization: Key Concepts and Major Debates (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); George Rizer and Paul Dean, Globalization: A Basic Text (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015); Luke Martell, The Sociology of Globalization (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016); Manfred B. Steger, Globalization: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Global Mélange (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019); Iyall Keri E. Smith, Sociology of Globalization: Cultures, Economies, and Politics (London: Taylor & Francis, 2019). 17 See, among many others, Niklas Luhmann, “Die Weltgesellschaft,” in Soziologische Aufklärung 2. Aufsätze zur Theorie der Gesellschaft (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1975, 51–71); Peter Heintz, Die Weltgesellschaft im Spiegel von Ereignissen (Diessenhofen: Rüegger, 1982); Volker Bornschier and Peter Lengyel, World Society Studies 1 (Frankfurt/Main and New York: Campus, 1990); Rudolf Stichweh, Die Weltgesellschaft. Soziologische Analysen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2000); Theresa Wobbe, Weltgesellschaft (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2000); Niklas Luhmann, Theory of Society, vol. 1 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Ulrich Beck, World at Risk (Cambridge: Polity, 2008); Remus Gabriel Anghel, Eva Gerharz, Gilberto Rescher, and Monika Salzbrunn, The Making of World Society: Perspectives from Transnational Research (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2008); Gili S. Drori and Georg Krücken, World Society: The Writings of John Meyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2010); Niklas Luhmann, Theory of Society, vol. 2 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013); Veronika Wittmann, Weltgesellschaft. Rekonstruktion eines wissenschaftlichen Diskurses (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlag, 2014). 18 Saskia Sassen, The Global City. New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). 19 Martin Albrow, The Global Age: State and Society beyond Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996); Martin Albrow, “Auf dem Weg zu einer globalen Gesellschaft?” in Perspektiven der Weltgesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), 411–34.

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20 Pamela K. Crossley, Lynn H. Lees, and John W. Servos, Global Society: The World since 1900 (Wadsworth: Cengage Learning, 2012). 21 See, for example, Steven Vertovec, Transnationalism (London: Taylor & Francis, 2009); Steffen Mau, Social Transnationalism: Lifeworlds beyond the Nation-State (London: Taylor & Francis, 2010); Ludger Pries, Transnationalisierung: Theorie und Empirie grenzüberschreitender Vergesellschaftung (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2010). 22 Anthony Giddens, Runaway World: How Globalization Is Reshaping Our Lives (London: Routledge, 2002). 23 George Rizer, The McDonaldization of Society (Newbury Park, CA: Pine Forge Press, 1993). 24 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2000). 25 Shalini Randeria and Regina Römhild, in Jenseits des Eurozentrismus (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2013), 9–31. 26 Ulrich Beck, Der kosmopolitische Blick oder: Krieg ist Frieden (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004), 68. 27 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974); Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 28 Immanuel Wallerstein equates the singular concept of society with that of the capitalist world economy by arguing that it is solely the latter that has created the otherwise plural and diverse human communities. See Immanuel Wallerstein cited at Die Sozialwissenschaft “kaputt denken” (Weinheim: Beltz Athenäum Verlag, 1995), 9. 29 See, for example, Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, and James Bohman, Weltstaat oder Staatenwelt? Für und Wider die Idee einer Weltrepublik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002). 30 Ernst Otto Czempiel, Weltpolitik im Umbruch. Das internationale System nach dem Ende des OstWest-Konflikts (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1991). 31 Dirk Messner refers both to world society and to global economy as institutionally underdeveloped. He starts from the assumption that the future world society will not be a “globally extended nationstate,” the world economy no international expanded economy, and the developing project of the global governance system not a magnified image of democratic constitutional states. See Dirk Messner, Die Zukunft des Staates und der Politik. Möglichkeiten und Grenzen politischer Steuerung in der Weltgesellschaft (Bonn: J.H.W. Dietz, 1998), 9–12. 32 Niklas Luhmann, Theory of Society, vol. 1 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Niklas Luhmann, Theory of Society, vol. 2 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013); see for the German original Niklas Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997). 33 This definition of society is based on Niklas Luhmann. See Niklas Luhmann, Lexikon zur Soziologie (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1995), 235. 34 See the discussion at Veronika Wittmann, Kleines Lexikon der Politik (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2011), 685–7; Veronika Wittmann, in Kleines Lexikon der Politik (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2015), 734–6; Veronika Wittmann, and Dieter Meissner, in International Journal of Sustainable Energy Development 7.1 (2019): 384–91. 35 See, for example, Jürgen Habermas, Die postnationale Konstellation (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998); Jürgen Habermas, The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001). 36 See, for research on cosmopolitanism, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Homi K. Bhabha, Sheldon Pollock, and Carol A. Breckenridge, Cosmopolitanism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2002); Robert Fine, Cosmopolitanism: (London: Routledge, 2007); Gavin Kendall, Ian Woodward, and Zlatko Skrbis, The Sociology of Cosmopolitanism: Globalization, Identity, Culture, and Government (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Garrett W. Brown and David Held, The Cosmopolitanism Reader (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010); Maria Rovisco and Magdalena Nowicka, The Ashgate

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Research Companion to Cosmopolitanism (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2011); George Delanty, Routledge Handbook of Cosmopolitanism Studies (London: Routledge, 2017). 37 Ulrich Beck, World at Risk (Cambridge: Polity, 2008); see, for the German original, Ulrich Beck, Weltrisikogesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007). 38 John W. Meyer, Studies of the Modern World-System (New York: Academic Press, 1980), 109–37; John W. Meyer, John Boli, George M. Thomas, and Francisco O. Ramirez, “World Society and the Nation-State,” American Journal of Sociology 103.1 (1997): 144–81; John W. Meyer and Ronald J. Jepperson, “The ‘Actors’ of Modern Society: Cultural Rationalization and the Ongoing Expansion of Social Agency,” Sociological Theory 18.1 (2000): 100–20; John W. Meyer, Weltkultur. Wie die westlichen Prinzipien die Welt durchdringen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005); Gili S. Drori, John W. Meyer, and Hokyu Hwang, Globalization and Organization: World Society and Organizational Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Gili S. Drori and Georg Krücken, World Society: The Writings of John Meyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2010). 39 Peter Heintz, Die Weltgesellschaft im Spiegel von Ereignissen (Diessenhofen: Rüegger, 1982). 40 Niklas Luhmann, Die Weltgesellschaft in Soziologische Aufklärung 2. Aufsätze zur Theorie der Gesellschaft (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1975), 51–71; Niklas Luhmann, Theory of Society, vol. 1 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Niklas Luhmann, Theory of Society, vol. 2 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). See for secondary literature on Niklas Luhmann, Hans-Georg Moeller, Luhmann Explained: From Souls to Systems (Chicago: Open Court, 2006); Hans-Georg Moeller, The Radical Luhmann (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); Anders La Cour and Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Luhmann Observed: Radical Theoretical Encounters (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 41 See, for example, Rudolf Stichweh, Die Weltgesellschaft. Soziologische Analysen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000). 42 See, for methodological approaches overcoming methodological nationalism, for example, Anna Amelina, Devrimsel D. Nergiz, Thomas Faist, and Nina Glick Schiller, Beyond Methodological Nationalism: Research Methodologies for Cross-Border Studies (London: Routledge, 2012). 43 The world-scale risks generated by global and digital dynamics are paradigmatic topics for worlding sociology. Sociologists can, in accordance with criteria of worlding sociology and based on concepts of world sociology, offer expertise in dealing with global risks. The pandemic caused by the Covid-19 virus, for example, counts as a global risk, and people worldwide are affected by the new virus. No one is unaffected. Covid-19 is a global human experience. 44 See, for methodological cosmopolitanism, Ulrich Beck and Nathan Sznaider, “Unpacking Cosmopolitanism for the Social Sciences: A Research Agenda,” The British Journal of Sociology 57.1 (2006): 1–23; Ulrich Beck, “Cosmopolitan Sociology: Outline of a Paradigm Shift,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Cosmopolitanism (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2011): 17–32. 45 Given the fact that the British Prime Minister is just as affected by Covid-19 as a woman living in a disenfranchised community in Mumbai, one can clearly see that this is a global risk endangering all human beings regardless of their socioeconomic status, age group, ethnicity, sexual orientation, place of living, and so on. Although the infrastructure to avoid or to deal with the disease may still be connected to socioeconomic living standards and access to health systems, it is at the same time a fact that the virus cuts across all socioeconomic categories developed and applied by social sciences researchers over the last century. Considering that Covid-19 is a global human experience, the traditional research categories of sociology are not sufficient anymore to cover comprehensively social reality in the global age. 46 Elections, for example, as part of the political decision-making processes, take place digitally, and people earn the right to participate politically by using digital information and communication technologies via social media. 47 In small part, these scientific spaces already exist. Global studies, for example, positions itself exactly in this field. Scientists herein raise questions irrespective of their disciplinary background. On the

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other hand, global issues that affect humanity as a whole are discussed here. The starting point is thus the generation of scientifically sound answers to global challenges such as universal risks and contrary to the “garden thinking” of traditional scientific approaches within narrow discipline boundaries.

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Randeria, Shalini, and Regina Römhild. “Das postkoloniale Europa: Verflochtene Genealogie der Gegenwart – Einleitung zur erweiterten Auflage (2013).” In Jenseits des Eurozentrismus. Eds. Sebastian Conrad Sebastian, Shalini Randeria, and Regina Römhild. Second Edition. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2013. 9–31. Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization of Society. First Edition. Newbury Park, CA: Pine Forge Press, 1993. Ritzer, George, and Zeynep Atalay, eds. Readings in Globalization. Key Concepts and Major Debates. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Ritzer, George, and Paul Dean. Globalization: A Basic Text. Second Edition. Hoboken, NJ: WileyBlackwell, 2015. Robertson, Roland. “Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity.” In Global Modernities. Eds. Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash, and Roland Robertson. London: Sage, 1995. 15–30. Rovisco, Maria, and Magdalena Nowicka, eds. The Ashgate Research Companion to Cosmopolitanism. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2011. Sassen, Saskia. A Sociology of Globalization. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007. Sassen, Saskia. The Global City: Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Sauvy, Alfred. “Trois Mondes, Une Planète.” L’Observateur, August 14, 1952. Smith, Iyall Keri E., ed. Sociology of Globalization: Cultures, Economies, and Politics. London: Taylor & Francis, 2019. Steger, Manfred B. Globalization: A Very Short Introduction. Fourth Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Stichweh, Rudolf. Die Weltgesellschaft. Soziologische Analysen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000. Third World Quarterly. https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ctwq20/current (July 12, 2019). Vertovec, Steven. Transnationalism. London: Taylor & Francis, 2009. Wallerstein, Immanuel. Die Sozialwissenschaft “kaputt denken.” Weinheim: Beltz Athenäum Verlag, 1995. Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Press, 1974. Wallerstein, Immanuel. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Wittmann, Veronika. “Educating Global Citizens. An Imperative of Science in the 21st Century.” In Global Processes Journal, 3 (2020): 8–17. https://gpjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/EJournal-GLOBAL-PROCESSES-3.pdf (April 14, 2021). Wittmann, Veronika. “Old Terms and New Worlds. Challenges for Global Studies in the 21st Century.” In global-e. 21st Century Global Dynamics 12.41 (2019). https://www.21global.ucsb. edu/global-e/september-2019/old-terms-and-new-worlds-challenges-global-studies-21st-century (May 10, 2020). Wittmann, Veronika. “Weltgesellschaft.” In Kleines Lexikon der Politik. Eds. Dieter Nohlen and Florian Grotz. Fifth Edition. Munich: C. H. Beck, 2011. 685–7. Wittmann, Veronika. “Weltgesellschaft.” In Kleines Lexikon der Politik. Eds. Dieter Nohlen and Florian Grotz. Sixth Edition. Munich: C.H. Beck, 2015. 734–6. Wittmann, Veronika. Weltgesellschaft. Rekonstruktion eines wissenschaftlichen Diskurses. BadenBaden: Nomos Verlag, 2014. Wittmann, Veronika, and Dieter Meissner. “The Nexus of Energy for Free and World Society.” International Journal of Sustainable Energy Development 7.1 (2019): 384–91. Wobbe, Theresa. Weltgesellschaft. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2000.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Worlding Anthropology NIGEL RAPPORT

INTRODUCTION “Worlding” can seem an innocuous word to append to “sociocultural anthropology,” the study of our humanity as social creatures. But to consider how “worlding” bears historically and theoretically on this field of social science—how “worlding” is made meaningful in connection to the anthropological project and anthropological knowledge—is to adopt a political position as well as an epistemological one. Does human life in society and culture constitute “a” world, or are there many such worlds? What are the things and relations of which human social and cultural life is comprised—what is the precise ontology of the world of sociocultural relations? It is the assessment of the historian of anthropology George Stocking that the discipline may be viewed as “a continuing (and complex) dialectic between the universalism of ‘anthropos’ and the diversitarianism of ‘ethnos.’”1 A biological unity and generic rationality insist on one world of humankind: a species wholeness that manifests itself in universal, individually embodied, human lives. But then a diversity and continual variation of cultural forms, representing themselves as symbolic wholes, urge that each culture be deemed a world in itself, a world apart. Elaborating on this history—anthropology’s “recurrent dilemma”—“Worlding Anthropology” gives special attention to contemporary debates on global “cosmopolitics.” Is there one human “cosmos” or must all consideration of identity, rights, and society be mediated by cultural difference?

A BRIEF HISTORY In a series of important writings—“Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View” (1784); “Towards Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch” (1795/6); “Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View” (1798)—the philosopher Immanuel Kant outlined a set of “enlightened” ideas concerning normative globalism: how humanity should properly manage just social relations in a global expanse. It was Kant who laid the foundations for contemporary anthropological deliberations on “worlding.” Kant began by identifying three kinds of right. “Republican right” entailed domestic laws within a state; “international right” entailed treaties between nations; and “cosmopolitan right” entailed social relations of persons anywhere—“global citizens”—to one another and to states. Cosmopolitan rights were held by individuals by virtue of their humanity, not their community memberships, and were to be regarded as superior to those pertaining to states. Cosmopolitan rights overrode claims of national sovereignty and could bend the will of communities since these latter were intrinsically sentimental manifestations: particularistic,

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arbitrary, and nonrational. The logic of cosmopolitan rights derived from the limited space of the globe; we must accommodate one another because as a species we possess in common the surface of the globe—and no other. All human beings were attached equally to the globe. One was in effect a world citizen, member of the Commonwealth of Nature, and entitled to enter into dialogue with any human others in an open and uncoerced fashion. Kant envisaged a world where all of humanity could become participants in a global-legal order of civil coexistence. “Cosmopolitan right” thus came to sit alongside “cosmopolitan law” in a “cosmopolitan order.” The arbitrarily defined local society, or polis, gave way to a global polis or “cosmopolis”: a world state or federation with universal law and rational governance. Its practices would be “enlightened,” eschewing dogma and unvindicated authority. The public use of reason would predominate, generating critical vantage points from which to scrutinize and ever improve civil relations. Even the status of states would depend on their behavior in terms of common human values and democratic and legal principles. A so-called “Westphalian” political ordering, where states were answerable only to themselves—sovereign over their territories and people according to their might—gave way to a notion of “liberal” internationalism: cosmopolitan law guaranteed the rights of every individual human being, whether or not these individuals and these rights were originally or traditionally respected by their “own” communities. The global society of equal citizens would represent a “kingdom of ends” whose fundamental principle could be enunciated as an imperative: “Always behave so as to treat with equal respect the dignity of reason and of moral judgement in every human being.” Kant developed his ideas on cosmopolitanism at the same time as he formulated the idea of “anthropology” as a modern scientific discipline. “Anthropology” implemented a cosmopolitan project: it was to engage in the study of particular human lives—individuals living in specific spaces and locales—so as to derive understandings of human generalities and universal truths. Traversing the spectrum between the individual particular and the species whole—the subjective and the objective—provided anthropology with scientific insight into a human world. It also delivered a moral duty. Anthropology was provided with a global moral context: actual individual lives as versions of the best possible human lives. Was a human potentiality being best served in present customary practice? Individual lives were substantiations of universal human capacities: was there a way to improve relations between capacity and substance? Cosmopolitanism declared that there was an essential nature to humankind and to individual human beings that existed beyond the particular cultural traditions, symbolic classifications and identifications, and structurations of belonging and exclusion of particular communities. It insisted that a worldwide species sameness was an ontological truth—was the nature of an objective reality—while the classification of human beings into nations, or classes, or communities, or religions was merely customary: cultural, symbolic, rhetorical, and ideological. Writing at the same time as nationalism spread as a political philosophy in Europe, Kant’s formulations were radical and were intended as a critique and antidote: insisting on the universal over the particular, the human as against the local community, and the individual as end not means. The term “cosmopolite” had already figured in a 1577 treatise by the English polymath John Dee: General and Rare Memorials Pertaining to the Perfect Art of Navigation. Here, a cosmopolite was “a Citizen, and Member, of the whole and only one Mystical City Universal.”2 By Kant’s time, however, “cosmopolite” had come to be contrasted, often unfavorably, with “patriot”: a negation of a feeling for home. Cosmopolitanism, in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s influential summation, was an exile from a natural human place

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in the world: human beings necessarily embodied an unconscious, organic belonging to a place, language, and culture.3 To go beyond such local traditionalism in search of global truths surely precipitated an alienation from the “family of nations”: from a natural human consciousness, sentiment, and community. It was the case, then, that Kant’s project for anthropology did not initially prosper. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critique—Johann Gottfried Herder and Joseph de Maistre alongside Hegel—reacted against Kant’s extolling of a humanistic holism by claiming that there was no such thing to know as “Man” or humankind, only Germans and Frenchmen, Persians, and so on, ensconced in a cultural-territorial primordialism.4 Despite Kant’s hopes for the discipline of anthropology, the social sciences came to be institutionalized within nationalistic regimens of education and social policy. The great nineteenth-century nationbuilding movements in Europe subsumed social science so that its concern was to invigorate or invent, to explain and analyze, particular communitarian traditions—tribes, races, religions, nations—rather than establishing the nature of the human beyond these. Certainly in sociocultural anthropology it was a relativistic position that came to be adopted by Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, and by Franz Boas, in the French, British, and American traditions that they established. Human beings became human (moral, social, occasionally individual) only under the influence of the consciences collectives of particular cultural milieux. The effects of socialization or enculturation on identity were such that human-animal appetites could be absolutely distinguished from human-moral consciousness. Those universal human-bodily natures that provided the base material for social life and cultural traditions came to be overwritten (transmogrified) by the particular social structures, religions, habituses, and discourses under whose aegis social and cultural life were effected. In short, a focus on, and an elective affinity with, ethnic relativities— the cultural traditions and social organizations of particular tribes, villages, communities, religions, nationalities—came to predominate in anthropology over a focus on a single and universal human condition, on global processes, and on the human individual as manifestation of a human nature.5 Anthropologists have not been cosmopolitans, as the philosopher Kwame Appiah recently summed up; their disciplinary signature is a relativistic one: the apprehending, sanctioning, and delimiting of “native” difference, each distinct culture a world in itself.6

A UNIVERSALIST ANTHROPOLOGY: COSMOPOLITANISM AND CULTURE But this has not been the whole story. There has been, to recall George Stocking, a continuing tension between an anthropology that aimed at identifying the human, anthropos, as against one devoted to the ethnic or cultural, ethnos. Alongside the neo-Hegelian or -Herderian Durkheim, Mauss and Boas were the neo-Kantian Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel, urging the “unity of Man.”7 A humanist, universalist approach, adopting a unifying, global orientation to anthropological description and analysis, has led to paradigms of Marxist anthropology,8 evolutionary anthropology,9 cognitive anthropology,10 feminist anthropology,11 literary anthropology,12 and liberal anthropology.13 In recent years, a growing amount of work has explicitly returned to the Kantian concept of “the cosmopolitan” in order to come to terms with the experience of research subjects that is somehow global—“worldly”—rather than provincial. “Cosmopolitanism” has achieved a

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certain social-scientific momentum: a “growing intellectual movement.”14 Anthropologists have seen fit to deliberate on “pre-modern” and “modern” cosmopolitans,15 “instrumental, aesthetic, political and cultural cosmopolitans”;16 also on indigenous cosmopolitans,17 cosmopolitan dancers and choreographers,18 urban Caribbean cosmopolitans,19 hill-farming English cosmopolitans,20 diasporic Chinese cosmopolitans,21 rural Togolese cosmopolitans,22 upper-class cosmopolitan Cairene youth,23 working-class Pakistani cosmopolitan migrants,24 and heretical cosmopolitan Muslim intellectuals,25 on “plural discrepant cosmopolitanisms,”26 cosmopolitan imaginations,27 and cosmopolitan civilities.28 A range of positions exists regarding how anthropology might come to terms with cosmopolitanism.29 This diversity notwithstanding, in deploying the term, anthropologists recognize five specifically “worldly” features of contemporary social life. First, “cosmopolitan” specifies a kind of attitude or orientation: belonging to a social whole that exists beyond the confines of kinship, ethnicity, or nationality. The erstwhile seeming “‘naturalness’ of ethnic absolutisms” (whether of tribe, nation, or minority community) is undermined, people having a sense that beyond mundane exclusivities of everyday life there exists a global trans-communal society.30 Second, “cosmopolitan” identifies a specific kind of human actor, someone who prides himself or herself on “heterophilia”: the aesthetic and intellectual desire and confidence to enter into different forms of life. He or she asserts personal autonomy with regard to local cultures, never swearing absolute allegiance or surrendering to anyone.31 Third, “cosmopolitan” identifies a specific kind of social condition, the defining feature of a new era in which national borders and differences dissolve or must be renegotiated in accordance with the logic of a global political economy. While the era of nation-states formalized a monologic imaginary of demarcation and exclusion, a cosmopolitan condition replaces such seductive insularity with global dialogue.32 Fourth, “cosmopolitan” identifies a specific kind of morality that encompasses all of humanity. All are moral agents vis-à-vis one another. Anyone whom one’s actions can impact upon is a necessary interlocutor: the world is seen to comprise individual human beings, all of whom are worthy of equal respect as seats of self-consciousness.33 And fifth, “cosmopolitan” identifies a specific kind of ideal, social policy: the universal application of human reason for the establishment of political institutions (legislative, jurisdictional, executive) with global reach. The world comprises individual human beings with the capacity for self-determination. Just social arrangements are such as to enable the universal free expression of those capacities.34 Common to these versions of “cosmopolitan” identifications, and fundamental, is a particular understanding of “culture,” among anthropologists but also among their research subjects (at least to an extent). Far from primordial, organic, determining, culture is regarded as a kind of rhetoric: the application of languages, verbal and other, from whose common symbols experience might be exchanged and made to appear shared, habitual, orderly, and proper. But this is a surface only. Culture amounts to a symbolic clothing: a medium of expression, a “vehicle for a conception.”35 It may be the case that human experience comes to be expressed in terms of cultural symbols, but culture remains a matter of surfaces, of linguistic forms. Culture is not an organism, a thing-in-itself; it does not live. Culture has no interests, no intentions, no agency. Rather, it is human usage—individual application—which animates cultural-symbolic forms, providing them with the force, in particular instances, to effect specific purposes. Culture can be said to be a site at which a diversity of (distinct, contradictory, competing) individual intentionalities meet one another symbolically.36 Culture is a process, not a thing, and it is a site of ambiguity. Its commonality is formal and superficial: a rhetoric underlain by an abiding individual distinctiveness.

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GLOBALIZATION AND IDENTITY POLITICS Cosmopolitanism presupposes human beings as possessing essential individual identities. They are situated ontologically beyond particular communitarian arrangements, beyond the fictions of any one culture. A universalist, cosmopolitan anthropology thus distances itself from a “multiculturalism” that takes differences of culture to express deeper ontological realities. The latter political movement imagines human cultures to be comparable to species, and human beings as ultimately ensconced in cultural “homelands”: sacrosanct, self-sufficient unities of language, land, and community heritage.37 Multiculturalism would deem individual human beings to be epiphenomenal products of particular traditions, customs, and landscapes, their natures ascribed to, and dependent on, particular cultural spheres, whereas, according to cosmopolitanism, community and culture ideally express a solidarity and a sociability based on voluntarism (achievement and choice), diversity, and self-consciousness.38 Cosmopolitanism conceives of social inclusiveness less in terms of homogeneity and “integration” than “aggregation”: a continuing respect for the radical individual difference of which any human grouping is composed. One of the effects of globalization—of the human, social, economic, and even political world becoming more singular—is to render cultural surfaces more transparent. The human sameness beneath the surfaces of cultural difference becomes plain, as do individual idiosyncrasies beneath the political rhetorics of collective identity of nationalism, religious fundamentalism, and multiculturalism. A proliferation of cosmopolitan—transnational, creolizing, personal, and global—social networks makes communitarian notions of historically determined, collective cultural identities transparent merely as political rhetoric. The claims that personal identity is constituted by, and forever tied to, particular cultural milieux, particular beliefs and practices, and particular histories, habits, and discourses—and the related claim that individuals who exit such a collectively secured lifeworld must find themselves ontologically devastated, without social anchor or cognitive guarantee—appear as special pleading. Does such rhetoric not embrace a kind of cultural apartheid, a reimagining of a mythic communitarian isolation? Nonetheless, while globalization makes more transparent the “humankind” that exists as a (complex) singularity over and above proximal categorizations and identifications of nation, ethnicity, class, religion, gender, and locale, a challenge comes from a “strategic essentialism” that, paradoxically, insists on the ontological distinctiveness of each cultural construction of “world.”39 This is a call to “identity politics” on behalf of promoting the needs and interests of categories of people deemed to suffer from a structural disadvantage: “women,” “Blacks,” “children,” “Gypsies,” the “physically challenged”; “Muslims” in the “West”; economic migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees more broadly; “indigenous” populations in “settler societies,” and so on. According to Bruno Latour, it is “impossible for us now to inherit the beautiful idea of cosmopolitanism since what we lack is just what our prestigious ancestors possessed: a cosmos.”40 The “awesome multiplicity” of cultural perspectives revealed through ethnography means that it is the very makeup of the cosmos that is at stake. There is no common world except one that is painstakingly negotiated and “composed”; one must admit the common, constructed or “cultured” nature of the diversity of worlds of the earth’s entities before negotiations toward substantive commonalities can begin. Recognition of and respect for cultural distinctiveness must, in short, now repudiate all claims to “mononaturism,” to there being one nature, one world, and one humanity whose truths reason and science disclose. Whose “cosmos,” then, and which “cosmopolitics”? “Nature” and “culture,” “human” and

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“non-human” must be redefined as matters of perspective.41 Failure to admit to such relativity will mean that the “fundamentalism” of scientific “naturalizers” who appeal to “Nature Out There” and the fundamentalism of radical Islam, say, appealing to the revelation of the Koran and Sharia will war without end.42 Global commonality, Latour concludes, might be an ideal project in peaceableness, but it must be undertaken by a “pluriverse” of earthly “entities” who are at present “owned” and inhabited by a “freight of gods, attachments, and unruly cosmos [that] make it hard to get through the door into any common space.”43 Cosmopolitanism does not condone such strategic essentialism, however, even on behalf of categorially distinct cultural worlds, even in the cause of positive discrimination, believing that it accords identity and rights to fictional units that are then presumed to have a life of their own. The anthropologist must insist that “cognitive relativism is nonsense,” and “moral relativism is tragic,” in the words of Ernest Gellner: “You cannot understand the human condition if you ignore or deny its total transformation by the success of the scientific revolution … Valid knowledge ignores and does not engender frontiers.”44 Rather than hoping to move from knowledge to morality—“Given the nature of life on earth, this is how we should behave”— the culturalist or perspectivist logic of the likes of Latour appears to endorse a reverse kind of causation: “Given the historico-political situation, this is how we should know one another.” Furthermore, the fact that all human knowledge is “constructed”—in the sense of being made out, found out, using particular methods at particular times and places, and by virtue of particular traditions of fabrication and production—does not mean that all such knowledge possesses the same factuality. The status of scientific facts is not the same as cultural “facts,” then. While the latter remain “dependent on series of [human] mediations,” constructions that are “[apt to] fail and thus requiring careful maintenance and constant repair” by cultural “lifesupport systems,”45 the world to which science provides insight is independent. We can know it; we can adapt ourselves to it, and we can even know how to adapt it to our desires, partially. But there is no way in which scientific realities might “fail” in the way that cultural paradigms of knowing might fail. Our “construction” of knowledge gives onto different kinds of facts, in short; some are aesthetic in character, matters of taste, and some are empirical in character, matters of rational discernment. And while “culture” might be a name we wish to give to a sum of aesthetic judgments, “nature” is a domain of universal truths. The distinction between natural and cultural worlds is fundamental, in short, and vital to retain, as is a conceptualization that “science” is not equivalent to “religion,” or “rationality” to “taste.” It is in this way that a cosmopolitan anthropology might hope for a progression in human knowledge. Aesthetic judgment is distinguished from empirical assessment, while opinion and belief (“We believe the world is flat”) are distinguished from fact (“We know the world is round”). Particular, historically specific, cultural worldviews might thus give way to an accumulation of universal insight—global human truth—that one might call “civilization.”46 Globalization thus provides anthropology with a specific objective, Gellner concludes: “Our predicament is to work out the social options of our affluent and disenchanted condition. We have no choice about this.”47 And the starting point, Michael Jackson concurs, must be a reappraisal of the concept of culture, now recognized as “an idiom or vehicle of intersubjective life, but not its foundation or final cause”: anthropology must “annul” the language of cultural essence. To pursue a pragmatist critique of culture, Jackson elaborates, is to argue that identity politics and “category thinking” reduce the world to simplistic, exclusive classes that admit neither synthesis nor resolution, are self-perpetuating, and do not do justice to the identity.48 A “disenchanted” and “disenchanting” worldly anthropology

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insists that global society, just procedures, and objective knowledge should be seen as lying beyond claims to essentialistic culture, custom, and community. More precisely, a worldly anthropology pursues three pedagogic and political ends. First, worth mentioning is the universal recognition that the constituent units of humanity are individual actors—self-conscious, energetic, intentioning—not collectivities or communities, their discourses, and symbolic classifications. The variable nature of cultural ideologies of personhood should not occasion confusion concerning individuality as a human universal. The individual human being and the human species alike exist beyond culture: both possess an ontological reality—as things-in-themselves—over and above the rhetoric of culture, and its symbolic constructs do not. Second, one distinguishes the substance of particular cultural traditions or particular personal lifestyles from the overarching capacities of individuals (together and apart) to reimagine and recreate those traditions. It is a human capacity to make cultures; it can be an individual human choice to inhabit a particular cultural world. But neither the human species nor the human individual is beholden to particular cultures: species and individual exist beyond particular acts of making and particular choices and tastes. In short, cultural traditions, ideologies, and communities should be neither conflated with nor accorded status or respect equivalent to the concrete lives of individual actors who embody those traditions and communities at particular times—and who may (and have the right to) exit and pursue alternative habits and norms. Third, one endeavors to secure those legal conditions where individuals have a right to their own ideologies (religions, cultures) qua ideology, freely and continually chosen. But there is no right to impose ideological truth on individuals who do not choose to (continue to) belong. One aspires to that global moral environment where more and more human beings might know their lives to be their own achievement. One cherishes the capacity of anyone to make sense for oneself and to fill one’s life with personal value—as against a communitarianism where all are constrained to accept a common, ascribed framing of the aims of life. Cosmopolitanism hopes for a world civilization of rational exchange, liberal morality, and scientific knowledge. It recognizes the likely continuation of sentimental attachments and aesthetic comforts, however, and does not anticipate the demise of cultural and other collective belongings. It might not do “innocently” to appeal to an Old World of Enlightenment and transcendental certainties, Natan Sznaider observes, since “memory cultures” (of colonialism, black slavery, the Holocaust) remain strong.49 But it must nevertheless be possible to imagine cosmopolitanism migrating from the domain of abstract philosophy to engage people in their everyday lives by inviting them to see its universal insights and values in the contexts of their personal constructions of identity. Cosmopolitanism should not anticipate all being cosmopolitans, Kwame Appiah cautions, but it can hope for all “to share the political culture of the state”: to engage in “the political culture of liberalism and the constitutional order it entails.”50

CODA: THE HOPE OF A FUTURE WORLD “We are all human,” Ernest Gellner exhorts: “don’t take more specific classifications seriously.”51 A cosmopolitan anthropology provides a view beyond such classifications to one world. Emancipating the individual and the human from symbols and structures that reduce the world to exclusivist cultural fictions, a cosmopolitan anthropology gives onto a science and a morality of global humanity and the global human being: “Anyone.”52 The project of

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such a worldly anthropology is threefold: methodologically gaining access to human being; ontologically defining the singularity of human being; politically-cum-morally improving the lot of human being. A cosmopolitan anthropology would do justice to the ontological reality of humankind and of individual human lives occupying a single planetary space, as against the incoherency of multiple, discrete “worlds” of culturally constructed difference. We have seen that such worldliness is not and never has been an uncontested terrain. How might such an emancipatory project be hoped for and be measured? Three social practices are of portentous significance: the spread of human rights as a global discourse; the emergence of “world cities”; and the rise of worldwide “issues” expressed as global movements and campaigns. It has been argued that “international human rights [represent] the world’s first universal ideology,” if one surveys the public discourse on rights and the spread of human rights law.53 Such law disconnects the holding of rights from membership of nation-states and “holds out the promise of a global language that is capable of commanding loyalties in a postnational political environment.”54 This is not to overlook the difficulties involved: issues over enforcement; the supposed association of the ideas and institutions as Western, elitist, and interventionist; the purported foreignness of individualism as value. However contested the terrain, the very conceptualization of such global rights is significant, indicative of the moral weightiness of the issues over against the difficulties of their implementation. As Richard Wilson has observed, human rights have become a global political value and point to the possibility of a “post-cultural” world of liberal openness, challenging the claims that humankind is divided into essential collectivities with clear frontiers of culture and world.55 It was Kant’s prescription that individual human beings should possess rights globally: rights to create and join (and leave) cultural groupings, surely, but also rights to author unique identities and inhabit a space where they can come into their own.56 They do so as global citizens. “Citizenship” originally denoted a Renaissance urbanism that was open and inclusive and that contrasted to subjecthood, slavery, and alienage. The citizen of the humanistic citystate possessed rights to equal treatment and self-expression, whether this membership was native or the accrual of a stranger or refugee.57 It can be argued that only with the rise of the nationalism in the nineteenth century did the autonomy of the city—and an ethic of urbane, cosmopolitan hospitality—come to be subordinated to a national sovereignty and norms of communitarian homogeneity and closure. Recent decades, however, have seen a buffeting, even withering, of nation-states under the influence of global capital and global crisis (environmental and governmental). We witness the inability of nation-states to engender consensus, deliver democratic demands, or end violence. For some commentators, this also portends the return to prominence of the city as a global social form. As Verena Conley names it, a “cosmopolis” emerges, a world city, a world-as-city, a city-as-world, which “chaotically” exceeds the state as an imaginary, and circumvents the national by way of a global network of alliance and exchange.58 Here are urban spaces not as bounded territorial units but points of interaction in a matrix of global processes. The cosmopolis becomes a site where hybrid, diasporic, and cosmopolitan identities find refuge.59 Globalism becomes an everyday reality in world cities, Ulrich Beck elaborates, an encouraging of global movements of people, capital, objects, and ideas.60 One does not downplay the resistance, the nationalist-cum-fundamentalist-cum-populist reaction, against such openness, but there is the opportunity to become increasingly skeptical of the rhetoric that pretends to cultural separateness and purity. Living in world cities—merely existing in the shadow of global markets and international trade—encourages a consciousness that is global, an imaginary

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that is postnational or at least supranational. Out of the “demotic dailiness” of interaction in world cities, suggests Jeffrey Waldren, “cosmopolitan norms” of hospitality toward the “other” gradually crystallize, deeming all human beings equal repositories of entitlement and respect.61 There may be the periodic reactionary backlash, but a world sensibility grows, Beck is convinced, a sense of responsibility that expresses itself too in global social movements: against gender and racial inequalities, environmental degradation, Third World debt, health inequalities, and for animal rights.62 Here are indications of a new global politics, a world democracy with new political players: NGOs, lobby groups and campaigners, and grassroots voluntary associations. Not contained within a state nexus and operating beyond government structures, these political entities engage globally with existing structures of authority and demand global accountability. We are witnesses to a “globalization from below,” generative of a new public sphere of global debate and advocacy.63 We are witnessing not only a new imaginary and new norms, institutions, and sphere of exchange, but, according to Anthony Giddens, also a “revolution” concerning “how we think of ourselves and how we form ties and connections to others”: “a democracy of the emotions in everyday life.”64 Although such change advances unevenly in different places and meets resistance and setbacks, forms of personal relations come to prominence globally based not on traditional ascriptions but on the emotional rewards that derive from new forms of intimacy. Not only sex and love, parent–child relations, and friendship, but by virtue of new technologies, intimacy also enters into “resistance” movements that link people worldwide. The “emotional communication, and therefore intimacy, [that replaces] the old ties that used to bind together people’s personal lives” represents the “front line” in a battle between universalism and fundamentalism, Giddens notes, and opposition to traditionalist practices and policies now deemed reactionary and morally offensive.65 The world of the twenty-first century will witness cultural exclusionariness being countered by the creation of new forms of global, cosmopolitan society. The worlding of anthropology comprises not only the study of that global humanity and individuality that Kant claimed as ontological truth, but also the global social relations and institutions that he imagined as an enlightened expression of cosmopolitan right.

NOTES 1 George Stocking, The Ethnographer’s Magic and Other Essays in the History of Anthropology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 347. 2 John Dee, General and Rare Memorials Pertaining to the Perfect Art of Navigation (London: John Daye, 1577), 44. 3 See George Steiner, No Passion Spent (London: Faber, 1997), 305–7. 4 Joseph De Maistre, Considérations sur la France (London: Bâle, 1797), 102. 5 See Nigel Rapport, “An Outline for Cosmopolitan Study, for Reclaiming the Human through Introspection,” Current Anthropology 48.2 (2007): 257–83. 6 Kwame A. Appiah, Cosmopolitanism (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007), 14. 7 Edmund Leach, Social Anthropology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). 8 See Maurice Godelier, Perspectives in Marxist Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 9 See Ernest Gellner, Plough, Sword, and Book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 10 See Pascal Boyer, Minds Make Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). 11 See Ellen Lewin, ed., Feminist Anthropology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006). 12 See Fernando Poyatos, ed., Literary Anthropology (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1988).

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13 See Nigel Rapport, Transcendent Individual: Towards a Literary and Liberal Anthropology (London: Routledge, 1997). 14 Richard Werbner, “Foreword: Oceanic Visions. Situated Practices and the New Cosmopolitanism,” in Asian and Pacific Cosmopolitans, ed. K. Robinson (Palgrave: Basingstoke, 2007), x. 15 Ronald Stade, “Cosmos and Polis, Past and Present,” Theory, Culture and Society 24.7–8 (2007): 295–8. 16 Ulf Hannerz, “Cosmopolitanism,” in Companion to the Anthropology of Politics, eds. David Nugent and Joan Vincent (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 69–85. 17 Max Forte, ed., Indigenous Cosmopolitans (New York: Lang, 2010). 18 Helena Wulff, Dancing at the Crossroads (Oxford: Berghahn, 2009). 19 Huon Wardle, An Ethnography of Cosmopolitanism in Kingston, Jamaica (Lampeter: Mellen, 2000). 20 Nigel Rapport, Cosmopolitan Love and Individuality: Ethical Engagement beyond Culture (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), 184–200. 21 Aihwa Ong, “Flexible Citizenship among Chinese Cosmopolitans,” in Cosmopolitics, eds. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 134–62. 22 Charles Piot, Remotely Global (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 23 Mark Peterson, Connected in Cairo (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2011). 24 Pnina Werbner, “Global Pathways: Working-Class Cosmopolitans and the Creation of Transnational Ethnic Worlds,” Social Anthropology 7.1 (1999): 17–35. 25 Carool Kersten, Cosmopolitans and Heretics (London: Hurst, 2011). 26 James Clifford, “Mixed Feelings,” in Cosmopolitics, eds. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 362–70. 27 Marsha Meskimmon, Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination (London: Routledge, 2010). 28 Elijah Anderson, “The Cosmopolitan Canopy,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 393 (2004): 14–31. 29 See Maria Rovisco and Magdalena Nowicka, eds., The Ashgate Research Companion to Cosmopolitanism (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011); Gerard Delanty, ed., Handbook of Cosmopolitan Studies (London: Routledge, 2012). 30 Edward Simpson and Kai Kresse, “Cosmopolitanism Contested: Anthropology and History in the Western Indian Ocean,” in Struggling with History, eds. Edward Simson and Kai Kresse (London: Hurst, 2007), 1–42. 31 Ulf Hannerz, “Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture,” Theory, Culture, and Society 7.2–3 (1990): 237–51. 32 Ulrich Beck, Cosmopolitan Vision (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), 88. 33 Seyla Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 34 David Held, “Principles of Cosmopolitan Order,” in The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism, eds. G. Brock and H. Brighouse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 10–27. 35 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic, 1973), 208n19. 36 Nigel Rapport, Diverse World-Views in an English Village (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993). 37 See James Tully, Strange Multiplicity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 38 See Ulrich Beck, “The Cosmopolitan Society and its Enemies,” Theory, Culture, and Society 19.1–2 (2002): 17–44. 39 Gayatri Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” in The Spivak Reader, eds. D. Landry and G. MacLean (London: Routledge, 1996), 203–36. 40 Bruno Latour, “Whose Cosmos, Which Cosmopolitics?” Common Knowledge 10.3 (2004): 453. 41 See Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4.3 (1998): 469–88. 42 Latour, “Whose Cosmos, Which Cosmopolitics?” 459–60. 43 Ibid., 454–57.

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44 Ernest Gellner, “Anything Goes: The Carnival of Cheap Relativism Which Threatens to Swamp the Coming Fin De Millenaire,” Times Literary Supplement, June 16, (1995), 8. 45 Latour, “Whose Cosmos, Which Cosmopolitics?” 458–59. 46 See Nigel Rapport, “The Liberal Treatment of Difference: An Untimely Meditation on Culture and Civilization,” Current Anthropology 52.5 (2011): 687–710. 47 Gellner, “Anything Goes,” 8. 48 Michael Jackson, The Politics of Storytelling (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2002), 114–26. 49 Natan Sznaider, “A Jewish Comment on Cosmopolitan Citizenship in the Middle East,” Open Democracy (August 10, 2010), http://www.opendemocracy.net/natan-sznaider/jewish-commenton-cosmopolitan-citizenship-in-middle-east. 50 Kwame A. Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Patriots,” in Cosmopolitics, eds. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 107. 51 Ernest Gellner, “The Mightier Pen? Edward Said and the Double Standards of Inside-Out Colonialism,” Times Literary Supplement, February 19, 1993, 3. 52 Nigel Rapport, Anyone: The Cosmopolitan Subject of Anthropology (Oxford: Berghahn, 2012). 53 David Weissbrodt, “Human Rights,” in Human Rights, ed. P. Davies (London: Routledge, 1988), 1. 54 Bryan Turner, “Cosmopolitan Virtue, Globalization and Patriotism,” Theory, Culture, and Society 19.1–2 (2002): 46. 55 Richard Wilson, “Introduction,” in Human Rights, Culture, and Context, ed. Richard Wilson (London: Pluto, 1997), 10. 56 Vered Amit and Nigel Rapport, The Trouble with Community: Anthropological Reflections on Movement, Identity, and Collectivity (London: Pluto, 2002); Vered Amit and Nigel Rapport, Community, Cosmopolitanism, and the Problem of Human Commonality (London: Pluto, 2012). 57 See Heonik Kwon, “The Ghosts of War and the Spirit of Cosmopolitanism,” History of Religions 47.4 (2008): 23–5. 58 Verena Conley, “Chaosmopolis,” Theory, Culture, and Society 19.1–2 (2002): 127. 59 See Nigel Rapport, “Diaspora, Cosmopolis, Global Refuge: Three Voices of the Supranational City,” in Locating the Field, eds. Simon Coleman and Peter Collins (Oxford: Berghahn, 2006), 179–97. 60 Ulrich Beck, Cosmopolitan Vision (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), 88. 61 Jeremy Waldron, “Cosmopolitan Norms,” in Another Cosmopolitanism, ed. Seyla Benhabib (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 97. 62 Ulrich Beck, “The Cosmopolitan Manifesto,” New Statesman, March 20, 1998, 28–30. 63 Richard Falk, “Revisioning Cosmopolitanism,” in Love of Country, ed. J. Cohen (Boston: Beacon, 1996), 58. 64 Anthony Giddens, Runaway World (London: Profile, 2002), 19, 63. 65 Ibid., 61.

WORKS CITED Amit, Vered, and Nigel Rapport. Community, Cosmopolitanism, and the Problem of Human Commonality. London: Pluto, 2012. Amit, Vered, and Nigel Rapport. The Trouble with Community: Anthropological Reflections on Movement, Identity, and Collectivity. London: Pluto, 2002. Anderson, Elijah. “The Cosmopolitan Canopy.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 393 (2004): 14–31. Appiah, Kwame, A. “Cosmopolitan Patriots.” In Cosmopolitics. Eds. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998, 91–115. Appiah, Kwame A. Cosmopolitanism. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007. Beck, Ulrich. “The Cosmopolitan Manifesto.” New Statesman, March 20, 1998, 28–30.

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Beck, Ulrich. “The Cosmopolitan Society and its Enemies.” Theory, Culture, and Society 19.1–2 (2002): 17–44. Beck, Ulrich. Cosmopolitan Vision. Cambridge: Polity, 2006. Benhabib, Seyla. Another Cosmopolitanism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Boyer, Pascal. Minds Make Societies. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. Clifford, James. “Mixed Feelings.” In Cosmopolitics. Eds. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. 362–70. Conley, Verena. “Chaosmopolis.” Theory, Culture, and Society 19.1–2 (2002): 127–38. Dee, John. General and Rare Memorials Pertaining to the Perfect Art of Navigation. London: John Daye, 1577. Delanty, Gerard, ed. Handbook of Cosmopolitan Studies. London: Routledge, 2012. Falk, Richard. “Revisioning Cosmopolitanism.” In Love of Country. Ed. J. Cohen. Boston: Beacon, 1996. 53–60. Forte, Max, ed. Indigenous Cosmopolitans. New York: Lang, 2010. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic, 1973. Gellner, Ernest. “Anything Goes: The Carnival of Cheap Relativism Which Threatens to Swamp the Coming Fin De Millenaire.” Times Literary Supplement, June 16, 1995, 6–8. Gellner, Ernest. “The Mightier Pen? Edward Said and the Double Standards of Inside-Out Colonialism.” Times Literary Supplement, February 19, 1993, 3–4. Gellner, Ernest. Plough, Sword, and Book. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Giddens, Anthony. Runaway World. London: Profile, 2002. Godelier, Maurice. Perspectives in Marxist Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Hannerz, Ulf. “Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture.” Theory, Culture, and Society 7.2–3 (1990): 237–51. Hannerz, Ulf. “Cosmopolitanism.” In Companion to the Anthropology of Politics. Eds. David Nugent and Joan Vincent. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. 69–85. Held, David. “Principles of Cosmopolitan Order.” In The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism. Eds. G. Brock and H. Brighouse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 10–27. Jackson, Michael. The Politics of Storytelling. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2002. Kersten, Carool. Cosmopolitans and Heretics. London: Hurst, 2011. Kwon, Heonik. “The Ghosts of War and the Spirit of Cosmopolitanism.” History of Religions 47.4 (2008): 22–42. Latour, Bruno. “Whose Cosmos, Which Cosmopolitics?” Common Knowledge 10.3 (2004): 450–62. Leach, Edmund. Social Anthropology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. Lewin, Ellen, ed. Feminist Anthropology. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. Maistre, Joseph de. Considérations sur la France. London: Bâle, 1797. Meskimmon, Marsha. Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination. London: Routledge, 2010. Ong, Aihwa. “Flexible Citizenship Among Chinese Cosmopolitans.” In Cosmopolitics. Eds. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. 134–62. Peterson, Mark. Connected in Cairo. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2011. Piot, Charles. Remotely Global. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Poyatos, Fernando, ed. Literary Anthropology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1988. Rapport, Nigel. Anyone: The Cosmopolitan Subject of Anthropology. Oxford: Berghahn, 2012. Rapport, Nigel. Cosmopolitan Love and Individuality: Ethical Engagement beyond Culture. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019. Rapport, Nigel. “Diaspora, Cosmopolis, Global Refuge: Three Voices of the Supranational City.” In Locating the Field. Eds. Simon Coleman and Peter Collins. Oxford: Berghahn, 2006. 179–97. Rapport, Nigel. Diverse World-Views in an English Village. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993. Rapport, Nigel. “The Liberal Treatment of Difference: An Untimely Meditation on Culture and Civilization.” Current Anthropology 52.5 (2011): 687–710. Rapport, Nigel. “An Outline for Cosmopolitan Study, for Reclaiming the Human through Introspection.” Current Anthropology 48.2 (2007): 257–83.

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Rapport, Nigel. Transcendent Individual: Towards a Literary and Liberal Anthropology. London: Routledge, 1997. Rovisco, Maria, and Magdalena Nowicka, eds. The Ashgate Research Companion to Cosmopolitanism. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. Simpson, Edward, and Kai Kresse. “Cosmopolitanism Contested: Anthropology and History in the Western Indian Ocean.” In Struggling with History. Eds. Edward Simson and Kai Kresse. London: Hurst, 2007. 1–42. Spivak, Gayatri. “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography.” In The Spivak Reader. Eds. D. Landry and G. MacLean. London: Routledge, 1996. 203–36. Stade, Ronald. “Cosmos and Polis, Past and Present.” Theory, Culture, and Society 24.7–8 (2007): 295–8. Steiner, George. No Passion Spent. London: Faber, 1997. Stocking, George. The Ethnographer’s Magic and Other Essays in the History of Anthropology. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992. Sznaider, Natan. “A Jewish Comment on Cosmopolitan Citizenship in the Middle East.” Open Democracy, August 10, 2010. http://www.opendemocracy.net/natan-sznaider/jewish-comment-oncosmopolitan-citizenship-in-middle-east. Tully, James. Strange Multiplicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Turner, Bryan. “Cosmopolitan Virtue, Globalization and Patriotism.” Theory, Culture, and Society 19.1–2 (2002): 45–63. Viveiros De Castro, Eduardo. “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4.3 (1998): 469–88. Waldron, Jeremy. “Cosmopolitan Norms.” In Another Cosmopolitanism. Ed. Seyla Benhabib. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 83–101. Wardle, Huon. An Ethnography of Cosmopolitanism in Kingston, Jamaica. Lampeter: Mellen, 2000. Weissbrodt, David. “Human Rights.” In Human Rights. Ed. P. Davies. London: Routledge, 1988. 1–20. Werbner, Pnina. “Global Pathways: Working-Class Cosmopolitans and the Creation of Transnational Ethnic Worlds.” Social Anthropology 7.1 (1999): 17–35. Werbner, Richard. “Foreword: Oceanic Visions. Situated Practices and the New Cosmopolitanism.” In Asian and Pacific Cosmopolitans. Ed. K. Robinson. Palgrave: Basingstoke, 2007. x–xvi. Wilson, Richard. “Introduction.” In Human Rights, Culture, and Context. Ed. Richard Wilson. London: Pluto, 1997. 1–27. Wulff, Helena. Dancing at the Crossroads. Oxford: Berghahn, 2009.

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Worlding Economics PETER HITCHCOCK

Capital is an economic relation premised on inequality, and its world connotes the scale through which this process takes place. Yet, given the profound unevenness of economic activity generally discussed at a “world scale” and its determinate intersectionality with all levels of social life, the world of economics has no world that could capture cognitively the world of difference and différance it otherwise represents (the sense of the world, “sens du monde”1 in each use marks material incongruity). On the face of it, exploring world theory in terms of contemporary economics should be the easiest of tasks, attached as it is to an idea of political economy that has been “worldly” for centuries. A standard definition is thus: “The world economy or global economy is the economy of all humans of the world, considered as the international exchange of goods and services that is expressed in monetary units of account.”2 To write labor into this formula (living labor as opposed to the dead labor of capital), itself mediated and overdetermined by myriad forms and identities, is at once to subtend the worlding at stake, as if “world economy” primarily describes the deficit between the two words. This is even more evident if one considers women’s labor in the production and reproduction of social life. Sylvia Federici, for instance, offers a polemical and contrasting sense of world economy: “it is through the day-to-day activities by means of which we produce our existence, that we can develop our capacity to cooperate and not only resist our dehumanization but learn to reconstruct the world as a space of nurturing, creativity, and care.”3 Concomitantly, while contemporary globalization is otherwise obstinately defined economically as the saturation and circulation of capital at the level of world (yet more deficit!), the theoretical perquisites of such a world are remarkably provincial, so that the politics of scaling are always in question when a nation or corporation goes “worlding.” This contribution will analyze the extent to which the otherwise compulsive logics of globalization place constitutive limits on the world imagined and narrated. Could it be that the economic pressure on world as concept presages a world that would paradoxically transform its economic priorities? Capitalism has never been anything less than a paradigm of economy with global pretensions. Thus, rather than recount its longue durée, with “successes” that are always already coterminous with expansion, extraction, imperialism, colonialism, and subjugation of epochal proportions, one could problematize the persistence of these elements (with their countervailing forces of resistance and revolutionary alternatives) through vectors of temporality, spatiality, and velocity in the contemporary world system, pinned by laws of motion in capital as relation. Such an invocation of world here is ineluctably reductive and risks a false universality, one that might occlude a more positive instantiation in economic activity and forms of socialization, as Federici’s assessment already indicates. The hope is always that in addressing the logic of economic worlding in capitalism (its “realism,” as

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Mark Fisher put it4) one might come to terms with the antinomies that actually impede the effulgence of a truly world economy, the rallying of an oppositional force worldly at the level of economic and social justice over and above a system of relations primed to produce and reproduce exploitation by any means necessary. Does the time of capital overdetermine the world imaginable in its image? Are the spatial abstractions of global capital hegemonic because they fortuitously revel in the ambivalence, contingency, and stochastics in which “world” is figured? Is the dynamism of contemporary capitalism such that it races ahead not just of material contradictions (via spatial fixes, just in time production, and the like) but also the realization of imaginative alternatives? When Fredric Jameson noted (or misremembered, depending on the source) that someone once said it was easier to imagine the end of the world than it was the end of capitalism,5 we could interpret the conceit to include the notion that extinction is comprehensible at the level of world in a way that capitalism is not. Indeed, one could go further and suggest that the reduction of economic inequality pivots precisely on the extent of an imaginative deficit in the idea of world addressed. To my other questions, one might legitimately ask if the end of global capitalism depends also on the cognitive construction of the world it otherwise obfuscates, displaces, or falsifies. What often appears arbitrary or vaguely commonsensical (realism once more) is an inkling of a dataset that empiricism actually refuses. It is always the other story of world narration. This, too, is a ground of economic struggle. The dictionary definition of world economy noted above is as eminently anodyne as it is coruscatingly anthropocentric. Further doubt emerges in the elision of world and global (there may be one globe, but there are certainly many worlds) and the assumptions made about “exchange” and monetary units of account. Clearly, there are myriad forms of economic activity taking place around the world that do not necessarily depend on money or systems of exchange in which monetary units of account are paramount. Indeed, the harmlessness of the definition belies the extensive ideological sutures required to permit its passionate and violent everydayness to persist. As other parts of this collection accentuate, the deployment of “world” is undeniably a catalyst in conceptual inertia, but its combination with economy troubles its constitutive logic beyond the predictive reflexes that both suspend and suspect its worldly nature. Again, how this happens mediates the terms of critique, of political economy in particular. Of course, while ardent proponents of capitalism in or as world economy proffer that exploitation is a small price to pay for the social good that is growth, development, or ease of living (aka “modernity”), there are others who say that what permits a world system of economy has reached a determinate inflection point in its worldliness (not least in terms of climate change and the environment) and that its “world” needs to be denatured and deconstructed in order for any world to live on (sur-vivre, as Derrida once put it6). Since capitalist ontology and its attendant existential claims are premised on crisis, it is never hard to see one in its present (debt in Asia 1997–1998, the mortgage-backed shambles of 2007– 2008, and the multileveled catastrophe that is Covid-19). Similarly, whether a crisis is critical is also bound to degrees of crisis in critique so that the problems of the world system follow not just the acumen but also the agonistic contours of the methodologies used to discern and diagnose them. To build on the questions posed so far, I want to provide some polemical examples that speak to certain dialectical dilemmas in this regard before returning to the future of world economy as concept and fact in our deliberations on worlding. In my previous research, the “world” of world economy has been problematized along several axes. Much of this investigation comes down to the concrete tension between the logics of capital and the literary, especially in postcolonial and decolonial writing—what

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might be deemed world literature from below. One can think of lots of examples in this regard, each one with a history and perspective on how one might imagine the economic globally (for instance, Multatuli’s Max Havelaar, Mulk Raj Anand’s Coolie, Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood, Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, Ousmane Sembene’s Black Docker, Chetan Bhagat’s One Night at the Call Center, Koli Jean Bofane’s Congo Inc., and Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Buru Quartet—I will return to the latter below). A correlative critical dimension is that, while economists might view the disputes over the world of world literature in the last thirty years as planned obsolescence (the last hurrah of the humanities in higher education before its weird aesthetic tics get subsumed by properly utilitarian disciplines), they actually refract the material conditions of worldliness in provocative ways. For example, they highlight methodological problems in the formation of literary studies itself and the consanguine ties between such “development” and the class structures produced in the relations of labor and capital. On the one hand, the world of world literature was never simply coextensive with the worldliness that took capital on its global “voyages”; on the other hand, its symptomatic representations of civilization and/ as barbarism (slavery, settlement, incorporation) give one pause about the conditions of magnanimity in the very concept of world. Another area of research has been the extent to which the efficacy in understanding and challenging the world economy pivot on reading practices, in particular, reading capital itself (this is connected to conditions of translatability in “world”; indeed, we might think of “world” as an “untranslatable” in Barbara Cassin’s sense, caught as it is between universalism and material particularity7). Not surprisingly, much analysis of world economy (and again, this signals the contradictions of world and globe) is closer to description rather than critique, or else favors brusque conclusions based on selections of statistical evidence. In part, this is facilitated by the easy attribute of world as a conceptual signifier that is simultaneously existential and ontological, but it is no worse on its own terms than the anthological imperative one sees in world literature collections—the idea that provincialism is overcome by a steady diet of accretion: just add more examples and the problem of seeing the disjunctions of the literary world are masterfully overcome by sheer quantity. In both cases, the world is represented by not addressing the logic in which world is arrayed. Given the vastness and complexity of the world system, political economy often resorts to metonymy and in particular synecdoche. Because of the relative size of the US economy, for instance, it can do the work of world in its referentiality, and variations in the world economy can be made extensions of those that are peculiar to US development and crises. While it would be a slight exaggeration to say that the World Bank is synecdochically American, it would be naive to believe that the latter’s influence does not mediate the sign of “world” and its component parts. And then there are crises in the world economy that seem to trip from this primary insistence. The financial debacle of 2007–2008 was not wholly American in its basis, but tracing mortgage-backed securities, for instance, could easily be used to warrant metonymic exuberance. The problem in the end comes down to referential desire, the desire called “worlding,” which is also and unsurprisingly an ideological reflex of hegemony. This distills, perhaps, an easy formula—world economy is the desire of capitalist hegemony rather than the content of its signification, which breaks such correspondence; and yet, the desire itself can sever this chain of signifiers more or less constantly, subverting in advance determinate possibilities of subreption. This is one reason (and there are many) that capitalist contradictions do not necessarily precipitate transformations of its systematicity at a world scale. If this sounds more like alibi rather than acuity it is something shared by diagnoses of capitalism that attempt to meet the scale of its process and interrelation.

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Although there is plenty of dispute regarding the forms of capitalism in a world economy in the present, there is considerable consensus around the idea that capital critique should eschew all taint of Marx in such endeavor! Thus, to the function of metonymy or substitution in the apprehension of world in world economy we might enjoin the notion of subtraction when it comes to Marx and capital as relation in the contemporary period. The art of subtraction in this move is positively Zen, as if one might appreciate capital more by trimming away a damaging approach to capital’s worldly aspirations. At its most extreme, this permits a rendering of capitalism that reduces unevenness and contradiction to relative zero (a marked contrast to the Hegelian distinction Žižek makes in Less than Nothing8). In Thomas Friedman’s wonderfully buoyant global critique, The World Is Flat,9 Michael Sandel (a Harvard economist) “startled slightly” Friedman by suggesting that it was Marx (and Engels) in the Communist Manifesto who recognized the special “leveling” powers of global capitalism, and Friedman then provides an extensive (and famous) quotation from the text to that effect. After the Manifesto has pinpointed how markets tear down walls, and the bourgeoisie produces a [flat] world in its own image,10 Friedman notes laconically, “it’s hard to believe Marx [sic] published that in 1848.”11 And that is it. The question of global labor the Manifesto invokes, or what I have called elsewhere “worker of the world(s)” is simply dropped (“the nation state is the biggest source of friction”12 and, in a remarkable misreading of the relevant phrases, Friedman suggests the real issue is what should be kept “solid” and what should be left to melt away into the air, as if globalization is little more than a checklist rather than a knot of socioeconomic contradictions. Now free from the more obstinate elements of a world historical project Friedman warns: “Brace yourself. You are about to enter the flat world”).13 The twilight of Marx, the space of a now peripatetic Minerva, becomes a twilight zone in Friedman’s book, a small world of fantastic Disney proportions where the al Qaeda operative Ayman al-Zawahiri can be described as a “neo-Leninist Muslim revolutionary”14 (despite the reminder in the quote mentioned above that “all that is holy is profaned,” and Lenin’s wellknown position on religion). In an earlier and related wide-ranging tome on globalization, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Friedman again invokes Marx, but this time as an economist of the Cold War, another twilight assessment to be sure. The same quotation from the Manifesto is deployed, then clarified by adding Marx’s name to … Mussolini’s.15 It is unfair, of course, to root a banalization of political economy in Friedman’s articulation, but it is worth mentioning as an example of how flattening can defuse/diffuse critical reflexivity, a conceptual involution that leaves the very idea of capital at a world scale obtuse, or irrelevant beyond the signifier itself. One can see the same tendency in the economist Joseph E. Stiglitz’s People, Power, and Profits, where lilting alliteration cannot mask the fact that at no point does Stiglitz elaborate what capital means in his copious references to capitalism.16 Stiglitz bemoans the fact that standard economic textbooks do not link the word “exploitation” to labor, but surely to under-theorize capital is precisely to perform this elision? True, some of Stiglitz’s analysis of markets and finance in particular grapple with capitalist processes and, instead of Friedman’s rah-rah technological determinism, he offers a way to understand the relationship of automation to aggregate demand (without recourse to Marx on the automaton, naturally) and a turn away from Clintonesque neoliberalism toward economic policies based on government intervention and progressive taxation. This is the “another world is possible” gambit—yet one based not on taking power but on “easy reforms,” as he puts it. As Stiglitz has worked for the World Bank and is a keen observer of “externalities” (costs or benefits caused by a producer that do not necessarily help or harm that producer), one wonders what

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the “world” might do to provincial prescriptions (something Stiglitz acknowledges in his use of the term “globalized economy”). As the United States has learned at great cost, there is a disconnect between being the world’s largest economy and determining world economy. Similarly, corporations and capitalists are old hands at dealing with reform and taxes and have little trouble exercising flexible sovereignty in capital markets. In a final flourish, Stiglitz avers that it is still not too late to save capitalism from itself; yet the contemporary capitalist, especially the financier, still sees too many ways to save capital for “himself.” And this is an antinomy of capital as relation, not that of a national economy per se. Robert B. Reich, another former member of the Clinton administration, also favors a declarative and reparative mode. In Saving Capitalism—For the Many, Not the Few, Reich bemoans the fact that in the good old days of the American economy after the Second World War, the richest 1 percent took home 10 percent of all income and now take home 20 percent, as if some invisible hand of capital seeks only to place its finger on tolerable inequality.17 Bracketing centuries of evidence about the propensity of capital as relation, Reich boldly declares: “Contrary to Karl Marx, there is nothing about capitalism that leads inexorably to mounting economic insecurity and widening inequality.”18 True, one could view this in terms of long-term equilibrium, whereby excessive accumulation strategies are eventually punished by the market, regulation, or demonstrable discontent, but the point is corrective measures would not be necessary but for the inexorable materialities of capitalist practice. However much pinned to his observations of nineteenth-century British industrialization, Marx sought to identify the structural elements of capitalist logic, including the social divisions it fosters, rather than simply endorse the universalism of economic exploitation. For Reich, especially after the financial crisis of 2007–2008, the problem is inadequate demand, a knock-on effect of depressed “middle-class” wages and tapped-out credit instruments coupled to low-growth fundamentals. Liberate a chunk of top-end accumulation, the thinking goes, and the US economy will grow for all concerned; otherwise, “when people feel that the system is unfair and arbitrary and that hard work does not pay off, we all end up losing.”19 The invocation of capital affect here is notable because, among the inexorabilities that capitalism is not supposed to have, it takes an enormous degree of ideological investment to head off the notion that the logic of accumulation is unfair and is based on labor abstraction and value extraction. At the level of argument, it also necessitates, yet again, the metonymic impulse whereby because the United States is the “center of global capitalism,” what is done within a national economy is easily limned to world economy as such. By contrast, every reference to China in Reich’s book, for instance, suggests an impossible substitution, a categorical error, a fundamental catachresis when prerogatives and policies are read through global difference. Indeed, the passionate claims for national(ist) reform are so idiosyncratic, provincial, and parochial one is tempted to reverse Reich’s subtitle, for the capitalism to be saved is for the few (America, 4 percent of the world’s population) while the righteously upbraided super-rich will obviously move taxable wealth to the space of least resistance (“if history is any guide and common sense has any sway,” to borrow from Reich’s conclusion20), unless that space is taken, seized. Of course, one can draw global conclusions from the fate of the wealth of individual nations, but this puts pressure on the framework of world deployed. Perhaps the first rule of cognizing world economy is a theory of worlding that can articulate the difference of time/space that is its world. The world, in this conception, is a chronotope of difference in which the reproduction of the relations of production takes place. The space of economy is absolute, relative, and relational, but then so is its time, which does not pair off in neat correspondences (the use of the term “unevenness” only begins to indicate the difficulty of

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the abstruse correlation of world economy). One could argue, for instance, that the idea of nation favors a form of absolute space in its borders and juridical or state self-identity, but relative time questions that base (absolute when?), while a relational view might concede that the United States is real, but only to the extent that it can be intuitively imagined rather than empirically measured (the world as a system of meanwhiles, to borrow from Benedict Anderson via Walter Benjamin, rather than as a map of definitive statistical chronologies21). Once one attempts to think the interplay of these differential modes simultaneously a certain vertigo ensues, as if the very idea of world economy is premised on a constitutive impossibility, so we agree on data that are difficult in their own way but are less likely to induce sensory overload, quantum dysphoria, or the wild oscillations and velocities of Leibnizian monads. What is proper to world economy is not statistical veridicality as such but the frames of human practice adequate to it. This does not mean that a sense of world economy that hinges on relations of production makes of relationality itself an absolute; rather, it conceives of “world” as produced in multiple conflicting processes rather than as a given that otherwise smooths the contradictions constantly at work in its very possibility. Surely, however, normative and stable frames of reference, “flat worldism” and the like, not only find their own level of adequacy, but wrestle with absolute, relative, and relational inconsistencies along the way, and that “worlding” is not a specific mode regarding the reproduction of the relations of production but any attempt to confront the forbidding abstraction of world economy? From this perspective, there is nothing particularly egregious about practical metonymy or undifferentiated worldliness evident in the examples above, yet such approaches suggest a defense of generalizability or pointed reform over and above a more agonistic representation of contradiction. Thus, the wealth of any nation in Adam Smith’s famous representation is challenged not just by the scale of world economy (in its time/spacing) but by the politics of its aggregate.22 This, indeed, is what is meant by capitalist globalization. If we accept that there is a world in which capital as relation is at the heart of the reproduction of relations of production, are there yet defining characteristics of its compositional logic? Acknowledging, for instance, that Marx’s critique of political economy is situated by the time/ space of a specific relationality, does the obvious and varied dynamism of capital achieve escape velocity from its primary accumulative prerogatives? The earlier examples, even at their most descriptive, tend to affirm the persistence of the primary conditions of accumulation while studiously avoiding any paradigmatic Marxizing, some non-reformist reformism, or shift in basic premises. This is true even of the most widely known and cited critique of contemporary political economy, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, by Thomas Piketty.23 As critics have well noted, it is odd to call a book “Capital” when it is not really about capital (the relation), but about the unequal distribution of asset classes and returns on investment. Since Piketty has claimed not to have read Marx’s work of the same name (which does not seem entirely plausible—he invokes Marx on the fourth line of his book in relation to a principle discussed in Das Kapital), the world economy that emerges appears both familiar and arithmetically opaque. Piketty chunks and disaggregates vast amounts of data in order to underline that the inequalities of capitalism are not only a systemic problem but are getting qualitatively worse (this may not be Marx, but it is certainly his specter). Because capital in Piketty’s analysis is not sufficiently defined, it leads to basic categorical errors. For instance, as David Harvey among others has pointed out, capital that is withdrawn from circulation is not capital anymore, although the conditions of scarcity this may produce do facilitate the value inflation of other productive assets.24 One key advantage of Piketty’s approach is that he draws from long-term data sets, permitting pertinent pattern recognition over time. Yet, if Marx could

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be accused of over-extrapolating from his critique of primarily nineteenth-century British industrialism, then Piketty constructs an assessment of global or “patrimonial capitalism” that hinges on French, European, and some US statistics. For Piketty, revenue exceeding growth over two centuries is reason enough to repair inequality; for Marx, the process of capital itself is rooted in inequality and is beyond repair if social and economic justice is to be secured. What is the world of world economy in Piketty’s assessment? All of the features we associate with capitalist globalization and neoliberalism—the institutional triad [IMF, WTO, and World Bank], structural adjustment coupled with market deregulation, financialization, sub-contracting, re-located industrialism, de- and anti-unionization, technological economies of scale (automation, computerization), and privatization—constitute the investigative background for Piketty’s critique, but the methodological impress of “world” has other dimensions that require historical perspective, one of which, already invoked earlier, is a map of imaginary correlatives. This allusive corroboration in Piketty’s account perhaps puts a cultural shine on the otherwise dry arithmetic of capital accumulation, but it actually comes closer to Marx’s use of what S. S. Prawer terms “world literature,” the substance, as it were, of global expressivity, a genre in which the world of economy gets told.25 Marx’s deep engagement with literature often inspired him to test political economy through tropological adequacy, like umgekehrte Schlemihle, or the shadow that has lost its body invoked in the Eighteenth Brumaire, a void of social substance.26 Both Marx and Piketty turn to Honoré de Balzac, but whereas Marx looks to troubling typology (to some extent enhanced by his suspicions of bourgeois men of letters), Piketty sees only a foil, an imaginative engagement with economy compromised by a woeful deficit in econometrics. If literary evidence (like a reference to Jane Austen on rent) can be deployed to confirm statistical analysis, so much the better, but in general any shortfall in economic worldliness for Piketty bolsters the necessity for his critique, a doubly negative capability whereby literature is sought for its deficit while real abstraction, say, an understanding of capital in terms of the labor theory of value, is evident only in its absence, notwithstanding the labor/capital split he describes. In a cruel paradox, Piketty demonstrates the inequality in the heart of capitalism by bracketing the very quality that enables the rationalization of its worldliness, the imaginary sutures that stitch the scene of its processes. Thus, Piketty indeed establishes categorical worlds of difference in world economy—not just between the top decile in income and the rest, but within that decile where the greater portion, the managerial class, still lives primarily by the sale of labor, while the infamous 1 percent works its income machinations via the asset management of capital itself. Piketty admits to a certain porosity in this top decile, and in the “two worlds” he describes within it, but “the differences are nevertheless clear and systematic.”27 Unless, of course, one is attempting to imagine the composition of a class structured in dominance, in which case raw percentages can obfuscate the world economy articulated. Put another way, by invoking the imaginary without any concept of modes of address (conscious and otherwise), Piketty cannot explain one of the main ways inequality is held in place: ideology. The publishing event that was Capital in 2013/2014 demonstrates, albeit in a comparatively modest way, how culture is suffused with complex and contradictory ideological reflexes. While any attack on those dastardly one percenters is basically beyond reproach (even billionaires like Buffet and Gates themselves join in), one can, for instance, yet imagine a world economy in which the benefits of a tax on obscene wealth might first accrue to the rest of that top decile. Neoliberalism, one recalls, might be overly liberal with regard to markets, but it has little difficulty with liberalism as class control, a filter system (state, corporations,

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banks, “interest groups”) that can reduce a gush of righteous redistribution to a trickle. Again, these are problems of scale, time, and location—unevenness not just between the developed and developing worlds, or between a Global North and South, but in the class structures within states and the apparatuses necessary to their reproduction and consolidation. Piketty, sensitive to the hundreds of reviews, special sections of journals, conference topics, critical anthologies, and all kinds of social media buzz about his book, embarked upon an even longer project (twice as long in fact) to reframe its substance in terms of the absences of world in its original conceptualization. If Piketty had been flagrantly misread (or barely read) in Capital as “the new Marx,” then in his Capital and Ideology28 we no doubt see an even newer Marx (perhaps that of the Grundrisse or The German Ideology29) primed to account for a world economy that cleaves more closely to contours of a world beyond the Global North, both in terms of geographic and imaginary substance. If the absence of any definition of capital as relation in the first book is remarkable, the wholesale omission of any genealogy of the concept of ideology in the second book is astounding. True, Piketty does ask “what is an ideology?” but his answer studiously eschews any of the major thinkers on the subject (Marx, Lukács, The Frankfurt School, Arendt, Mannheim, Althusser, Bourdieu, Balibar, Hall, Thompson, Williams, and Žižek among many others). It is disconcerting in a book of over 1,100 pages that Piketty can note “ideological conflict and disagreement are inherent in the very notion of ideology” without actually detailing any.30 Because of all of the aforementioned problems and exigencies around the use of “world” in world economy, it is essential to explicate the role of ideology in such a configuration (even if “world” is often only a metonym for “political” as such). What Piketty does with the World Inequality Database is innovative and persuasive on many levels (even if based upon the principle of ownership rather than modes of accumulation), but he tends to conjure capital and ideology ex nihilo, as if to actually engage theories and theorists would somehow critically compromise the distinctiveness of the polemic on inequality he wishes to advance (similarly, one could argue Capital and Ideology is a unique refutation of Piketty’s Capital, but only by not citing the critics of the earlier tome who have come before). Once again, Piketty seems to want the literary to do the work of the global rather than argue the details with theorists of capitalist globalization (Wallerstein or Arrighi, for instance31). Interestingly, at one point, such an approach means learning and leaning from the postcolonial and, since I have written on some of the authors invoked in this regard,32 it may help to clarify what we now mean by the worlding of world economy. Just in case the reader might miss the connection between the abstraction of world in world economy and the imagination of world in world literature, Piketty declares (rather than argues) a methodological consanguinity: “Literature’s unique ability to capture the relations of power and domination between social groups and to detect the way in which inequalities are experienced by individuals exists, as we shall see, in all societies.”33 Even if we set aside demonstrable challenges to literature’s “uniqueness” in the visual, oral, etc., and a casual universalism, one cannot help but notice that not only do Piketty’s brief literary excursions do the work of cultural complexity, but they also seem to advance an understanding of ideology otherwise bereft of conceptualization. It would take much more analysis than here to elaborate Piketty’s reading of postcolonial critique in the second section of the book around slave and colonial societies, but one might nevertheless introduce a cautious appreciation of literary worlding in this endeavor. Few doubt that the literary can perform ideology, but because of the latter’s negative connotations vis-à-vis the aesthetic it is less read in terms of its counterhegemonic function. To underline the inequality regime of property law in colonialism,

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Piketty turns to the first volume from Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Buru Quartet, This Earth of Mankind (Bumi manusia, 1980), and the figure of Sanikem, who has risen from a “nyai” (concubine), sold by her father to the Dutch colonialist Herbert Mellema, to become the manager of a plantation in Java at the backend of the nineteenth century (although Sanikem is her name, as critique she often insists on the moniker Nyai Ontosoroh, where Ontosoroh is a Javanese substitute for Buitenzorg, the name of the Dutch agricultural company that owns the operation and a reference to the first governor general of the Dutch East Indies).34 There is so much more to this novel, Pramoedya, and Nyai Ontosoroh than can be articulated here, but in many ways it is a casebook on colonialism, capitalism, and the chronotopes in which world economy can be told. To use it as a narrative about ownership in a globalizing capitalist world is a radical reduction of its provocation, which begins with the terse “Buru. Spoken 1973. Written 1975.” Buru was the island where Pramoedya was imprisoned by the Suharto regime for almost ten years. After his manuscripts and research for his fiction on the “becoming nation” of Indonesia were destroyed, Pramoedya reconstructed the memory of the narrative by telling its story to fellow prisoners, whose own responses and versions of Bildung were built into the transcription Pramoedya subsequently had smuggled from the prison—and this is only one way worlding gets decolonized in Pramoedya’s oeuvre. Acknowledging one of the rather large lacunae in his Capital, Piketty continues: “this is not a classic European novel [by, presumably, Balzac], and the essence of the matter lies elsewhere: the colonial inequality regime is based above all on inequalities of status, on ethnic and racial identity.”35 The pivotal role of racial capitalism and gender discrimination in globalization is indisputable and often exploits the “inequality regimes” of local formations (in Pramoedya’s case, the space and place of Java in the archipelago). Why mention Piketty’s literary précis in a book that tracks ideological formations of inequality over several centuries, continents, and state structures? While many other cultural artifacts are noted (including the movie Black Panther and the novel Amerikanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie36), the invocation of Pramoedya’s work draws us into the marked impossibility of representing world economy (either as statistic or as novelization) precisely because of the representational paradox redolent in world itself. Pramoedya offers an inequality regime that Piketty recognizes, yet Pramoedya’s fiction is founded on the logical constraints of composition, which are always and never the material contradictions of capital in a world system. The imagination is the means to explore that conundrum but is not of course the substance, as Marx well knew, of capital and its ideological subsistence. Is the lesson of Piketty not what he proposes but is compelled (in true ideological mode) not to say? Because global capitalism is read as a dominant of world economy, the point is not just to refute the conditions of inequality it clearly fosters but is to challenge continually the epistemological foundations of its processes. It would be facile to say that all roads lead back to the literary in such endeavor, and yet the aesthetic dimensions of worlding economy have a deep purchase on the material instantiations of living capital as relation in daily life, what we might think of as the “meanwhiles” of value extraction and circulation. In effect, the literary neither confirms the imaginary conditions of political economy (including the pronounced fantasies of endless growth and perfect technology) nor the idea data processing unproblematically distills global policy; in Piketty’s case, what he calls “participatory socialism”—another moment in his text when Marx might have made a grudging appearance. Literature’s ability to cognize and refract the economic at various scales comes principally through its articulation of worlds, the temporospatial coordinates of social life. In this sense, the apprehension of gross inequality in world economy is not only a question for state

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structures and forthright policy changes, but it is a challenge for imagination, the discrepant concinnity of worlding. What is a world economy where statistical inequality is superfluous? This is still a world to win, and it is necessarily beyond the worlding of globalization itself.

NOTES 1 See Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 2 “World Economy,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_economy. 3 Sylvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero (Brooklyn: Common Notions, 2012), 3. 4 Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester: Zero Books, 2009). 5 Fredric Jameson, “Future City,” New Left Review 21 (May/June 2003): 76. 6 Jacques Derrida, “Living On,” in Parages, trans. James Hulbert, ed. John P. Leavey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 103–92. 7 Barbara Cassin, ed., Dictionary of Untranslatables, trans. Steven Rendall, Christian Hubert, Jeffrey Mehlman, Nathanael Stein, and Michael Syrotinski, eds. Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). 8 Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2012). 9 Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2005). 10 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London: Verso, 1998), 40. 11 Friedman, The World Is Flat, 235. 12 Ibid., 236. 13 Ibid., 259. 14 Ibid., 560. 15 Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1999). 16 Joseph Stiglitz, People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019). 17 Robert B. Reich, Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few (New York: Vintage, 2015). 18 Ibid., xii. 19 Ibid., 166. 20 Ibid., 219. 21 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York: Verso, 1983), 24. 22 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Bantam, 2003). 23 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 24 David Harvey, “Afterthoughts on Piketty’s Capital,” http://davidharvey.org/2014/05/afterthoughtspikettys-capital/. 25 S. S. Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). 26 Karl Marx, Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 1851–53, vol. 11 (New York: International Publishers, 1980), 125. 27 Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 281. 28 Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019). 29 Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. with a foreword by Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin, 1993); and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1998). 30 Piketty, Capital and Ideology, 3. 31 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System, 4 vols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1994).

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32 Peter Hitchcock, Labor in Culture; or, Worker of the World(s) (London: Palgrave, 2017); Peter Hitchcock, “Worlds of Americana,” in American Literature as World Literature, ed. Jeffrey R. Di Leo (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 89–106; and Peter Hitchcock, The Long Space: Transnationalism and Postcolonial Form (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). 33 Piketty, Capital and Ideology, 16. 34 Pramoedya Ananta Toer, This Earth of Mankind, trans. Max Lane (New York: Penguin, 1991). 35 Piketty, Capital and Ideology, 289. 36 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Amerikanah (New York: Knopf, 2013); and Black Panther, dir. R. Coogler, Marvel Studios, 2018.

WORKS CITED Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Amerikanah. New York: Knopf, 2013. Anand, Mulk Raj. Coolie. New Delhi: Penguin, 1993. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. New York: Verso, 1983. Arrighi, Giovanni. The Long Twentieth Century. London: Verso, 1994. Bhagat, Chetan. One Night at the Call Center. New York: Ballantine, 2007. Black Panther. Dir. R. Coogler, Marvel Studios, 2018. Bofane, Koli Jean. Congo Inc.: Bismarck’s Testimony. Trans. Marjolijn de Jager. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018. Cassin, Barbara. ed., Dictionary of Untranslatables. Trans. Steven Rendall, Christian Hubert, Jeffrey Mehlman, Nathanael Stein, and Michael Syrotinski. Eds. Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. Derrida, Jacques. “Living On.” In Parages. Trans. James Hulbert. Ed. John P. Leavey. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. 103–92. Emecheta, Buchi. The Joys of Motherhood. London: Allison and Busby, 1979. Federici, Sylvia. Revolution at Point Zero. Brooklyn: Common Notions, 2012. Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester: Zero Books, 2009. Friedman, Thomas L. The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1999. Friedman, Thomas L. The World Is Flat. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2005. Hamid, Mohsin. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2014. Harvey, David. “Afterthoughts on Piketty’s Capital.” http://davidharvey.org/2014/05/afterthoughtspikettys-capital/. Hitchcock, Peter. Labor in Culture; or, Worker of the World(s). London: Palgrave, 2017. Hitchcock, Peter. The Long Space: Transnationalism and Postcolonial Form. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. Hitchcock, Peter. “Worlds of Americana.” In American Literature as World Literature. Ed. Jeffrey Di Leo. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. 89–106. Jameson, Fredric. “Future City.” New Left Review 21 (May/June 2003): 65–79. Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Trans. with a Foreword by Martin Nicolaus. London: Penguin, 1973. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 1851-53, Vol. 11. New York: International Publishers, 1980. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. London: Verso, 1998. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology. Amherst, MA: Prometheus Books, 1998. Multatuli, Eduard Douwes Dekker. Max Havelaar; or, the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company. Trans. Roy Edwards. New York: Penguin, 1967. Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Sense of the World. Trans. Jeffrey S. Librett. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. Piketty, Thomas. Capital and Ideology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Child of All Nations. Trans. Max Lane. New York: Penguin, 1991.

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Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Footsteps. Trans. Max Lane. New York: Penguin, 1990. Pramoedya Ananta Toer. House of Glass. Trans. Max Lane. New York: Penguin, 1992. Pramoedya Ananta Toer. This Earth of Mankind. Trans. Max Lane. New York: Penguin, 1991. Prawer, S. S. Karl Marx and World Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976. Reich, Robert B. Saving Capitalism—For the Many, Not the Few. New York: Vintage, 2015. Sembene, Ousmane. Black Docker. London: Heinemann, 1988. Smith, Adam. The Wealth of Nations. New York: Bantam, 2003. Stiglitz, Joseph. People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019. Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World System. 4 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. “World Economy.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_economy. Žižek, Slavoj. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso, 2012.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Worlding Psychoanalysis DANY NOBUS

Drawing on Heidegger’s influential essays on “The Origin of the Work of Art” and “The Thing,” Ranjana Khanna described “worlding” in the introduction to her 2003 book Dark Continents as the “profoundly ideological” creation of “strife between the unconcealed (worlded) and the concealed (earthed).”1 Applying this notion—as a noun, a verb, and a participle—to psychoanalysis, she subsequently engaged in a dual project: (1) to document “the world events through which psychoanalysis was produced,” which entails “the process of understanding the violence of the production of psychoanalysis in the world,” and (2) to employ psychoanalysis as “a critical reading practice which itself is a product of that initial violent projective saying.”2 With regard to the first part of her project, Khanna argued that psychoanalysis is a distinctly “colonial discipline,” because its emergence and early development were entirely “contingent upon the forms of European colonial nationalism at the turn of the last century.”3 “Psychoanalysis cannot be understood adequately in any context,” she averred, “without considering how it was constituted both in Europe and in its colonies … as a colonial discipline through the economic, political, cultural, and epistemic strife in the transition from earth into world.”4 This critical consideration of the constitutive colonial constellations that presided over the birth of psychoanalysis does not only involve drawing the boundary lines between the universal (civilized and unconcealed) psychoanalytic world and its particular (primitive and concealed) earth but also “the provincialization and parochialization of psychoanalysis” itself, as a historically contingent outlook on self- and nationhood, in order to give “life to uses of psychoanalysis differing from that formed by Freud in its metropolitan center.”5 For the second part of her program, Khanna then relied on a “reconfigured psychoanalysis,” notably the theoretical and clinical discipline that actively participated in the construction of postcolonial subjectivity but that also remained haunted by the specter of colonialism, in order to facilitate a new act of worlding, which involves the exposure of “colonial melancholy,” and which is exemplified most emphatically by the postcolonial intellectual who remains “haunted by the call of justice for the future.”6 For all the rhetorical force and emancipatory value of Khanna’s work, it is fair to say that, almost twenty years after it was first conceived, its impact on political theory, subaltern studies, postcolonial research, psychoanalysis, and the wider community has been remarkably unimpressive. Save a small handful of scholarly monographs, academic papers, and doctoral dissertations in the fields of history, comparative literature, human geography, and cultural studies, the project of “worlding psychoanalysis” has been all but ignored, most noticeably by psychoanalysts themselves.7 In this chapter, I do not wish to speculate at length about the reasons behind this evasiveness, although it probably exemplifies once again how the theoretical apparatus of psychoanalysis is extraordinarily resilient and resistant to critical examination, while simultaneously maintaining its cutting-edge status as a critical interpretive tool. Instead,

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I shall endeavor to reactivate Khanna’s project by means of a critical reflection upon its key conceptual premises and proposed implementation. Accordingly, “worlding psychoanalysis” will appear at least as necessary and urgent as it was twenty years ago, yet both the processes and its outcomes might need to be conceived in rather different terms and within more broadly articulated sociopolitical spheres, which include demographic shifts, technological advances, changes in the spatiotemporal coordinates of the human lived experience, ecological crises, and economic globalization. For this newly advanced worlding of psychoanalysis to succeed, then, the most important task would not so much reside in the progressive parochialization of the original Freudian paradigm and the concurrent revitalization of “other psychoanalyses,” but in the explicit recognition, by psychoanalytic scholars and practicing psychoanalysts alike, that the object of analysis is always already mediated by a certain fantasy, and that the only way in which this fantasy can be deconstructed in its distortive forces is for the subject of analysis, as an “irreducible heterogeneity,” to be equally acknowledged and transformed by the very process of analyzing.8 Put differently, in worlding psychoanalysis, the object of psychoanalysis should not just be denounced by a subject in the worlding strategies which the discipline and its authoritarian father-figures have adopted, or are in the process of transacting, but the analyzing subject should also be constantly worlded and re-worlded, that is to say continuously reconfigured and reinvented, as an ineluctable and untameable component of the analyzing chain. As I shall demonstrate, the gist of this essential dynamic of worlding as self-worlding was already intimated by Freud, expressed in the hybridization of European psychoanalytic conceptions of subjectivity in various parts of the globe, and subsequently reiterated by Lacan, yet in most cases the institutionalization of psychoanalytic practices and ideas culminated (and continues to result) in the radical concealment (“earthing”) of its creative potential. To start with the underlying premises of this project, we should first of all reconsider the Heideggerian dynamic relationship between world and earth. In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger never compromised on the axiom that the opposition between world and earth is strife (Streit), yet he was equally steadfast in arguing that this strife must never be confused with an intractable discord (Zwietracht), dispute (Hader), disruption (Störung), or destruction (Zerstörung), as would be the case with the Hegelian dialectics between mastery (Herrschaft) and servitude (Knechtschaft), whose conflict involves a violent struggle that can only be (temporarily) resolved by the unconditional submission of the one to the other.9 Heidegger conceived of the strife between world and earth as a rift whereby “the opponents raise each other into the self-assertion of their essences,” carry “the other beyond itself,” to the point where they “admit themselves into the intimacy of their simple belonging to one another.”10 When strife is exclusively interpreted as discord, world and worlding inevitably acquire strong negative connotations as acts of violence, because the status of the concealed becomes synonymous with the oppressed and the disposable. When strife is reduced to dispute, worlding is de facto tantamount to colonization, to the universal essentialization by a sovereign authority of concrete, singular existences, which might only be challenged and undone by an external agency through persistent acts of radical resistance. Yet in Heidegger’s original conception of the strife, the resistance is always already embedded in the essence of the process of worlding itself, because the earth will continue to manifest itself as an ontologically untameable entity, which will intermittently appear in the “liberating surge of its self-closedness.”11 World, on the other hand, cannot exist without the ground of the earth from which its worlding work pushes forward, and in its ongoing attempts at domesticating the earth (and rendering it inhabitable) it is simultaneously taken beyond itself, into unconcealed representational configurations that would never have existed without

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the primal strife. Abstract and abstruse as these principles may appear, it is important to remember that Heidegger was trying to make sense, here, of the origin of the work of art, the “source of its nature,” whereby his starting point was to show how it is not merely an object that arises from the creative act of a certain being called artist, but something that involves the problematic taming, shaping, and transformation of raw materials into a product that occupies a particular place in the human world. When we extend this account, and especially the proposition that strife constitutes transformational affiliation rather than mere discord, to psychoanalysis, the geopolitical dissemination of the Freudian paradigm during the twentieth century generates numerous examples of how worlding is indeed not just a matter of creating and sustaining binary oppositions between the (unconcealed, worlded) colonizer and the (concealed, earthed) colonized, but a much more complex process of interdependency, fusion, and hybridization. When, sometime during the late 1910s, psychoanalysis took root in Calcutta, then part of British colonial India, and the Indian Psychoanalytic Society gradually developed into the world’s fourth most important hub of psychoanalysis (after Vienna, Berlin, and London), the “colonized” clinicians never lost sight of already existing, traditional healing practices, and consistently promoted a hybrid version of psychoanalysis, variously refracted by and fully attuned to their own lifeworld.12 Even though the British Empire undoubtedly facilitated the psychoanalytic colonization of the Indian subcontinent, the colonial earth never completely relinquished its irreducible heterogeneity. Similar stories can be told about how French (colonial) psychoanalysis arrived and transformed itself on the shores of Morocco and about Egyptian scholars blending Freudian theory with Islamic mysticism.13 Yet this recurrent fusion of world and earth, despite their fundamental disparity, did not merely occur between the European centers of colonization and their colonized territories, but equally happened outside colonial geographies. The most telling illustration of this extra-colonial hybridization of psychoanalysis is still offered by the peculiar fate of psychoanalysis in Japan, where the Oedipus complex—one of the supporting pillars of Freud’s entire edifice—was replaced with an Ajase complex, whose conflicts and (transient) resolutions were subsumed under the aegis of a “dependency neurosis” (amae).14 Clearly, the cultural divisions between West and East did not require the violence of “worlding as colonization” for the East to reaffirm its own particularity in its clinical and theoretical confrontation with Western universality. More easily forgotten than the aforementioned examples of hybridization, but not less significant, is the fact that the transformational affiliation between world and earth also manifested itself within and between the European psychoanalytic centers. During the 1920s, when the question of psychoanalytic training standards became a major bone of contention within the international psychoanalytic community, irreconcilable differences started to emerge between the British and the Hungarian “traditions” of psychoanalysis, as well as between the Berlin training model and the “other” schools of thought.15 During the 1940s, the so-called “Freud-Klein controversies” within the British Psychoanalytic Society pitted Kleinians against Annafreudians, each faction claiming to epitomize the most truthful representation of the original psychoanalytic understanding of selfhood and trying to impose its universality over and against the particular recalcitrant earth from which the purportedly unorthodox approach had sprung.16 When, during the 1950s, Lacan presented his own version of psychoanalysis under the motto of a “return to Freud,” it was not only to encourage his audience to revisit the primary sources, but also to expose the Anglo-Saxon, predominantly American hegemony of psychoanalytic ego-psychology as a demonstrably fallacious deviation from the true spirit of Freud’s discovery.17 Perhaps more than any other

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discipline, the history of psychoanalysis is a fissiparous history, in which the universalizing aspirations of the unconcealed, worlded movements are time and again contested by the concealed, “wild” practitioners, whose representatives are occasionally excluded, as was the case with Lacan, by the allegedly sovereign agelasts of officialdom, only for the excluded to fight back with their own, rival ascensions to proclaimed universality, as was the case with Lacan.18 If, in the context of psychoanalysis, the strife between world and earth has not always resulted in a transformational affiliation of the opposing poles, but quite often in the confirmation of an insuperable rift, I believe this is primarily due to the calamitous effect of institutionalization, which is almost always tantamount to procedural formalism, intellectual dogmatism, and an inherent, narcissistic conviction that self-conscious unity is a necessary and sufficient condition for undisputed universality. Whereas the worlding of the earth, as a disposable resource, always carries the risk that human beings, as the worlders par excellence, become disposable themselves, the risk is far greater if the worlding is driven by self-serving institutional forces. Insofar as the world of psychoanalysis has thus far not been able to resist relying on and proliferating its institutional structures, it may therefore very well become the architect of its own collapse.19 It is crucial to reiterate, however, that the project of worlding psychoanalysis, both in the sense of psychoanalysis doing the worlding and as psychoanalysis being or needing to be worlded, should not just be addressed as a matter between a colonial (and colonizing) discipline and the colonized (or colonizable) territories in the geopolitical realm, but also as a question affecting and pervading the multifarious worlds of psychoanalysis itself. Worlding psychoanalysis does not merely obtain for the geographical place and sociopolitical position psychoanalysis occupies across the globe, but also for the concrete political economy of private clinical labor between a specific practicing psychoanalyst and a particular subject in treatment. In fact, this is the site where the world of psychoanalysis originated, and it is to this nexus of personal suffering, clinical expertise, theoretical framing, institutional regulation, and health-economic policies that worlding psychoanalysis should always be returned.20 Every psychoanalytic encounter—be it between East and West, between North and South, within the West, between psychoanalytic schools of thought, or within psychoanalytic traditions—is fundamentally shaped by the theories, concepts, and procedures that emerged from the original psychoanalytic collision of worlds, that between the authoritative world of the analyst and the world-in-suffering of the analytic patient. When Freud started out treating patients with the tools of his newly minted psychoanalytic approach, he rarely knew exactly what he was doing, or what he was trying to achieve, and sometimes experimented in ways that would now be designated as unequivocal boundary violations, yet he invariably felt the need to colonize his patients’ vulnerable state of mind with his own beliefs in the sexual aetiology of the neuroses and the Oedipus complex.21 At least until 1915, Freud the analyst was as much an educator of fragile minds as he was an unraveler of tangled and tussled unconscious representations. And when his patients categorically refused to accept his outlandish interpretations, like the seventeen-year-old girl he dubbed Dora, he became even more convinced that he had hit the unconscious sexual nail on its deeply repressed head.22 Yet over the years Freud slowly came to realize that professing knowledge and forcing the patient to acquiesce rarely resulted in concrete clinical success. On the contrary, he observed that on quite a few occasions the analyst’s knowledge elicited so-called “negative therapeutic reactions” in the patient—sudden relapses and unexpected exacerbations of the symptoms.23 Hence, as a prolonged, conflictual staging of worlds, the psychoanalytic treatment does not benefit from the analyst’s professed epistemic hegemony,

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even when patients explicitly position their analysts as rich repositories of therapeutic expertise. For the analyst to carry the patients’ earth beyond itself and create the psychic parameters for it to release its emancipatory energy, a transformational affiliation between world and earth needs to be installed in which the analyst’s knowledge is placed in a state of suspended animation, a place of Husserlian bracketing which makes room for the unfolding of the patient’s lived experience. During the 1950s, Lacan captured this essential abeyance of the analyst’s epistemic world with Nicolaus Cusanus’ term “ignorantia docta,” a “wise not-knowing,” and he even went so far as to proclaim that what psychoanalysts must know is how to ignore what they know.24 Some fifteen years later, when he proposed his theory of the four discourses, Lacan then augmented this principle with the ostensibly paradoxical statement that, in the discourse of the analyst, knowledge (on the side of the analyst) is held to operate in the place of, or qua truth.25 Counter-intuitive as it may seem, for Lacan truth could only ever be half-said: no matter how hard we try to render it accurately and completely, its symbolic representation situates truth by definition within a fictional structure, which can never do full justice to its existence as an absolute fact.26 However, Freud did not just learn to accept that his epistemic world would need to be bracketed for the psychoanalytic encounter to have a chance of success; he also conceded that every encounter with another world did not give him the right to judge this other world merely as an object to be analyzed, as a receptive earth through which his own world could be revalidated and upon which it could be newly cultivated, expanded, and reinvigorated. By contrast, the patient’s other world would also need to be acknowledged as an authentic source of transformational inspiration. In other words, the psychoanalytic encounter does not primarily serve the purpose to justify and legitimize both the analyst’s knowledge and the value of the analyzing subject as a professional position, but contains within itself a creative opportunity for this knowledge to be newly objectified as a distinct area of research. As the analyzing subject, the analyst thus stands to benefit as much from the analytic process as the patient (the object of analysis), provided the analyst is willing to question the fantasy (the preconceptions, assumptions, prejudices, and expectations) with which she or he has initiated the treatment and objectified the patient, and which in the last instance is also a fantasy about the sovereignty of his or her own epistemic world. Somewhat reluctantly, perhaps, Freud admitted in his postscript to “The Question of Lay Analysis” that it is impossible for the analyst to treat a patient “without learning something new.”27 In Heideggerian terms, this means that the transformational affiliation between the analyst’s world and the patient’s earth can only be maintained and rendered productive if the analyst’s world is reearthed, unpacked, and dismantled as a never fully established world, taken beyond itself by the irreducible heterogeneity of the particular subject who enters the process as a patient. Although Lacan would have vehemently disagreed with Sándor Ferenczi’s revolutionary (and hugely controversial) suggestion of a “mutual analysis” between patient and practitioner, he nonetheless indicated that the analyst’s knowledge should be kept in a state of failure, as an epistemic body that is as much, or even more the object of analysis as it is the driving subject behind the analytic process.28 Psychoanalytic anthropologists, ethno-psychoanalysts, and allochthonous (generally Western) practitioners working with indigenous subjects have understood the importance of dialogue, reflective analysis, complementarity, and irreducible heterogeneity much more deeply than their conventional counterparts in Eurocentric or predominantly white clinical settings.29 They have been much more vocal in arguing that—in the encounter between worlds, which does not just happen in an ethno-psychoanalytic context, but also (and perhaps

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more visibly than ever before, given the demographic and psycho-social repercussions of relocation, migration, and globalization) in a mainstream clinical environment—psychoanalysis, the theory as well as the practice, should operate not only as the instrument of analysis but also as the object to be analyzed.30 It goes without saying that the latter injunction is likely to instill discomfort and resistance in the practitioner or the scholar who is accustomed to employing psychoanalytic theory as a firmly established, rock-solid monolithic tool, which no doubt explains why psychoanalysis continues to flourish, including in postcolonial studies, without the analytic framework, the epistemic world, and the dominant matrices through which the analysis is being conducted, ever becoming transformed in themselves as the outcome of the interpretive process.31 As I stated earlier, worlding psychoanalysis, in both senses of the expression, remains as critical as it was twenty years ago, yet there are at least two major aspects of Heidegger’s mutually enriching strife between world and earth that are probably also in need of radical revision. First, in contending that the strife is predicated upon openness, while restricting this cardinal quality to the human life form, Heidegger’s outlook is fiercely and unapologetically anthropocentric. More than fifty years on, with a global climate crisis and the threat of mass extinction becoming part of human daily reality, it is not so much human cultural diversity that is at risk of perishing under the weight of white colonialism, but the preservation of planetary biodiversity and the ecosystem that has become a new moral imperative, requiring both an unconditional interspecies dialogue and an in-depth revaluation of the precarious relationship between living substance and inanimate matter.32 Second, whereas Heidegger famously proclaimed in “The Question Concerning Technology” that enframing (Gestell)— as the intrinsically expansionist essence of technology that reduces being to some kind of “standing reserve”—constitutes the most extreme, absolute danger, it might very well be the inherently expansionist essence of humanity itself that represents danger in the highest sense, pace the unstoppable rise of artificial intelligence and surveillance capitalism.33 Much more than the essence of technology, this might be the ultimate blind spot that could accelerate our own demise. How these challenges could be built into the worlding of psychoanalysis remains very much an open question.

NOTES 1 Ranjana Khanna, Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 4; Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1– 56; Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 163–80. 2 Ibid., 5. 3 Ibid., 6–7. 4 Ibid., 9. 5 Ibid., 12 and 11. 6 Ibid., 30. 7 For studies building upon, or integrating Khanna’s notion of “worlding psychoanalysis,” see Cherie Lacey, To Settle the Settler: Pathologies of Colonialism in New Zealand History Films, 1925– 2005 (PhD diss., The University of Auckland, 2010); Carolyn Pedwell, Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Cheryl McGeachan, “‘Worlding’ Psychoanalytic Insights: Unpicking R. D. Laing’s Geographies,” in Psychoanalytic Geographies, eds. Paul Kingsbury and Steve Pile (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2014), 89–102;

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Omnia El Shakry, The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017); Alex Lenoble, How to Occupy the Real: Postcolonial Literatures beyond Representation (PhD diss., Cornell University, 2019); Neetu Khanna, The Visceral Logics of Decolonization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020). 8 I am borrowing the term “irreducible heterogeneity” from Gyan Prakash’s critique of the totalizing aspirations of Western historiography. See Gyan Prakash, “Postcolonial Criticism and Indian Historiography,” Social Text 31/32 (1992): 14; Gyan Prakash, “Introduction,” in After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements, ed. Gyan Prakash (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 10. For the idea that Western historiography invariably relies on an all-encompassing Eurocentric master-narrative, see also Robert J. C. Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West, 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 2004). 9 Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 26. For the Hegelian dialectics between mastery and servitude, see Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, ed. and trans. Terry Pinkard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 108–16. 10 Ibid., 27. 11 Ibid. 12 See, for example, Shruti Kapila, “The ‘Godless’ Freud and His Indian Friends: An Indian Agenda for Psychoanalysis,” in Psychiatry and Empire, eds. Sloan Mahone and Megan Vaughan (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 124–52; Christiane Hartnack, “Colonial Dominions and the Psychoanalytic Couch: Synergies of Freudian Theory with Bengali Hindu Thought and Practices in British India,” in Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties, eds. Warwick Anderson, Deborah Jenson and Richard C. Keller (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011): 97–112; Uffa Jensen, Wie die Couch nach Kalkutta kam. Eine Globalgeschichte der frühen Psychoanalyse (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2019). 13 For the history of the confluence between French (colonial) psychoanalysis and Islamic spiritual healing practices in Morocco, see Jalil Bennani, Psychanalyse en terre d’Islam. Introduction à la psychanalyse au Maghreb (Ramonville Saint-Agne: Érès, 2008) and Stefania Pandolfo, Knot of the Soul: Madness, Psychoanalysis, Islam (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018). For the intersection between psychoanalytic discourses and Sufi mysticism in Egypt, see Omnia El Shakry, The Arabic Freud. For a more general, critical reading of the labile conjunction between psychoanalysis and Islam, see Joseph A. Massad, “Psychoanalysis, ‘Islam,’ and the Other of Liberalism,” in Islam in Liberalism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), 275–311. 14 See, for example, Takeo Doi, The Anatomy of Dependence: The Key Analysis of Japanese Behavior, trans. John Bester (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1973); Geoffrey H. Blowers and Serena Yang Hsueh Chi, “Freud’s Deshi: The Coming of Psychoanalysis to Japan,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 33.2 (1997): 115–26; Ian Parker, Japan in Analysis: Cultures of the Unconscious (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Keigo Okinogi, “Psychoanalysis in Japan,” in Freud and the Far East: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on the People and Culture of China, Japan, and Korea, ed. Salman Akhtar (Lanham, MD: Jason Aronson, 2009), 9–25. 15 For the dissenting psychoanalytic voices in Hungary and the development of the “Budapest School” of psychoanalysis, see Paul Harmat, Freud, Ferenczi und die ungarische Psychoanalyse (Tübingen: Diskord, 1988). For the role of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society in the standardization of psychoanalytic training, see Sidney L. Pomer, “Max Eitingon 1881–1943: The Organization of Psychoanalytic Training,” in Psychoanalytic Pioneers, eds. Franz Alexander, Samuel Eisenstein, and Martin Grotjahn (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1995), 51–62; Veronika Fuechtner, Berlin Psychoanalytic: Psychoanalysis and Culture in Weimar Republic Germany and Beyond (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 16 See Pearl King and Riccardo Steiner, eds., The Freud-Klein Controversies 1941–45 (London: Routledge, 1991). 17 See Jacques Lacan, The Seminar. Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique (1953-’54), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forrester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Jacques Lacan, “The

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Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis,” in Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), 334–63. 18 On November 19, 1963, a majority of members of the Société française de Psychanalyse, the psychoanalytic association to which Lacan belonged and which was already the result of an acrimonious split in the French psychoanalytic community some ten years earlier, voted to accept the motion to strip Lacan of his status as a training analyst so it could be granted reaffiliation to the International Psychoanalytic Association. When Lacan resumed his seminar in January 1964, he compared his “defrocking” to the institutional excommunication of Spinoza in July 1656, when a Rabbinic council decided to invoke the Talmudic writ of cherem (‫ ) ֶם ֫רֵח‬in order to expel him from their ranks on the grounds of heresy. Five months later, Lacan founded his own psychoanalytic school, in whose founding act he described its vision as a “movement of reconquest.” See Jacques Lacan, “Founding Act,” trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, in Television/A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1990), 97; Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), 3–4; Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France 1925–1985, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (London: Free Association Books, 1990), 358–69. 19 I should also remind the reader that Derrida’s merciless critique of the “worldification” of psychoanalysis, in his 1981 lecture on “geopsychoanalysis,” as a process that is conditioned by a self-imposed boundary between the Americas and the “rest of the world” was not so much directed at the world of psychoanalysis in itself, but rather at the policies and practices of the International Psychoanalytic Association, which was its main institutional body at the time. See Jacques Derrida, “Geopsychoanalysis: ‘ … and the rest of the world,’” trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, American Imago 48.2 (1991): 199–231. 20 For an excellent ethnographical study of the manifestations of this nexus in the metropolis of Chicago, see Kate Schechter, Illusions of a Future: Psychoanalysis and the Biopolitics of Desire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 21 For example, on December 28, 1907, the patient Freud would later talk and write about under the sobriquet of the “Rat Man” arrived at Berggasse 19 feeling hungry, and so Freud promptly took him into the kitchen of his apartment and gave him some food. See Sigmund Freud, “Addendum: Original Record of the Case,” in Standard Edition, ed. and trans. James Strachey, vol. 10 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1955), 303. 22 See Sigmund Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,” in Standard Edition, ed. and trans. James Strachey, vol. 7 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953), 70–1. 23 See Sigmund Freud, “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” in Standard Edition, ed. and trans. James Strachey, vol. 19 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1961), 166; Sigmund Freud, “New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. Lecture XXXII: Anxiety and Instinctual Life,” in Standard Edition, ed. and trans. James Strachey, vol. 22 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1960), 109–10. 24 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar. Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 278; Nicolaus Cusanus, On Learned Ignorance, trans. Jasper Hopkins (Minneapolis: Arthur J. Banning Press, 1985); Jacques Lacan, “Variations on the Standard Treatment,” in Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), 290. See also: Jacques Lacan, Talking to Brick Walls, trans. Adrian R. Price (Medford: Polity, 2017), 5. 25 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar. Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (1969-’70), ed. JacquesAlain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007), 36. 26 Jacques Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” in Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), 684. 27 Sigmund Freud, “Postscript to ‘The Question of Lay Analysis,’” in Standard Edition, ed. and trans. James Strachey, vol. 20 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1959), 256. 28 For Ferenczi’s idea of “mutual analysis,” see Judith Dupont (ed.), The Clinical Diary of Sándor Ferenczi, trans. Michael Balint and Nicola Zarday Jackson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

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Press, 1988), 3. For Lacan’s notion of “knowledge in failure,” see Jacques Lacan, “Lituraterre,” trans. Dany Nobus, Continental Philosophy Review 46.1 (2013): 329. Later in life, Freud categorically refused to see the theory of psychoanalysis as a totalizing “worldview” (Weltanschauung), but he maintained its aspirations to scientificity, as a method of investigation, and a body of knowledge that are inherently unfinished. See Sigmund Freud, “New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. Lecture XXXV: The Question of a Weltanschauung,” in Standard Edition, ed. and trans. James Strachey, vol. 22 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1960), 158–82. 29 Without singling out concrete studies, I can refer the reader to the highly instructive works of Wulf Sachs, Géza Róheim, Fritz Morgenthaler, George Devereux, Paul Parin, Florence Weiss, Mario Erdheim, Maya Nadig, Vincent Crapanzano, and Tobie Nathan. 30 By far the most outspoken campaigner for this type of self-critical psychoanalytic practice has been Frantz Fanon, yet his path-breaking work as a psychoanalytic practitioner is often obscured by his seminal contributions to critical race studies, the international civil rights movement, and Black consciousness activism. See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008). 31 The reader can measure the persistent antinomy between psychoanalysis as an instrument of critical analysis and psychoanalysis as the object of critical analysis by gauging the uncomfortable tension running through various contemporary works of postcolonial psychoanalytic interpretation. See, for example: Alfred J. López, “The Gaze of the White Wolf: Psychoanalysis, Whiteness, and Colonial Trauma,” in Postcolonial Whiteness: A Critical Reader on Race and Empire, ed. Alfred J. López (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 155–81; Ross Truscott and Derek Hook, “The Vicissitudes of Anger: Psychoanalysis in the Time of Apartheid,” in Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism, eds. Matt Ffytche and Daniel Pick (London: Routledge, 2016), 193–204; Gautam Basu Thakur, Postcolonial Lack: Identity, Culture, Surplus (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2020). 32 For a thought-provoking critical analysis of openness as the caesura between humanity and animality, see Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). For a radical critique of the Anthropocene, including its Kantian cosmopolitanism and Heideggerian human-exceptionalism, see Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). 33 See Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1977), 287–317.

WORKS CITED Agamben, Giorgio. The Open: Man and Animal [2002]. Trans. Kevin Attell. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. Bennani, Jalil. Psychanalyse en terre d’Islam. Introduction à la psychanalyse au Maghreb. Ramonville Saint-Agne: Érès, 2008. Blowers, Geoffrey H., and Serena Yang Hsueh Chi. “Freud’s Deshi: The Coming of Psychoanalysis to Japan.” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 33.2 (1997): 115–26. Cusanus, Nicolaus. On Learned Ignorance [1440]. Trans. Jasper Hopkins. Minneapolis: Arthur J. Banning Press, 1985. Derrida, Jacques. “Geopsychoanalysis: ‘ … and the rest of the world’ [1981].” Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. American Imago 48.2 (1991): 199–231. Doi, Takeo. The Anatomy of Dependence: The Key Analysis of Japanese Behavior [1971]. Trans. John Bester. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1973. Dupont, Judith, ed. The Clinical Diary of Sándor Ferenczi (1932) [1985]. Trans. Michael Balint and Nicola Zarday Jackson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.

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El Shakry, Omnia. The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks [1952]. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2008. Freud, Sigmund. “Addendum: Original Record of the Case [1907].” In Standard Edition. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. Vol. 10. London: The Hogarth Press, 1955. 251–318. Freud, Sigmund. “The Economic Problem of Masochism.” In Standard Edition. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. Vol. 19. London: The Hogarth Press, 1961. 155–70. Freud, Sigmund. “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria [1905].” In Standard Edition. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. Vol. 7. London: The Hogarth Press, 1953. 1–122. Freud, Sigmund. “New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. Lecture XXXII: Anxiety and Instinctual Life [1933].” In Standard Edition. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. Vol. 22. London: The Hogarth Press, 1960. 81–111. Freud, Sigmund. “New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. Lecture XXXV: The Question of a Weltanschauung [1933].” In Standard Edition. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. Vol. 22. London: The Hogarth Press, 1960. 158–82. Freud, Sigmund. “Postscript to ‘The Question of Lay Analysis’ [1927].” In Standard Edition. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. Vol. 20. London: The Hogarth Press, 1959. 251–58. Fuechtner, Veronika. Berlin Psychoanalytic: Psychoanalysis and Culture in Weimar Republic Germany and Beyond. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Harmat, Paul. Freud, Ferenczi und die ungarische Psychoanalyse. Tübingen: Diskord, 1988. Hartnack, Christiane. “Colonial Dominions and the Psychoanalytic Couch: Synergies of Freudian Theory with Bengali Hindu Thought and Practices in British India.” In Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties. Eds. Warwick Anderson, Deborah Jenson and Richard C. Keller. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. 97–112. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Phenomenology of Spirit [1807]. Ed. and trans. Terry Pinkard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Heidegger, Martin. “The Origin of the Work of Art [1936].” In Off the Beaten Track. Ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 1–56. Heidegger, Martin. “The Question Concerning Technology [1954].” In Basic Writings. Ed. David Farrell Krell. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1977. 287–317. Heidegger, Martin. “The Thing [1951].” in Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. 163–80. Jensen, Uffa. Wie die Couch nach Kalkutta kam. Eine Globalgeschichte der frühen Psychoanalyse. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2019. Kapila, Shruti. “The ‘Godless’ Freud and His Indian Friends: An Indian Agenda for Psychoanalysis.” In Psychiatry and Empire. Eds. Sloan Mahone and Megan Vaughan. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 124–52. Khanna, Neetu. The Visceral Logics of Decolonization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. Khanna, Ranjana. Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. King, Pearl and Riccardo Steiner, eds. The Freud-Klein Controversies 1941-45. London: Routledge, 1991. Lacan, Jacques. “Founding Act [1964].” Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman. In Television/A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1990. 97–106. Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (1964) [1973]. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994. Lacan, Jacques. “The Freudian Thing [1956].” In Ecrits. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. 334–63. Lacan, Jacques. “Lituraterre [1971].” Trans. Dany Nobus. Continental Philosophy Review 46.1 (2013): 327–34. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique (1953-’54) [1975]. Ed. JacquesAlain Miller. Trans. John Forrester. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

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Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (1969-’70) [1991]. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Russell Grigg. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007. Lacan, Jacques. “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious [1960].” In Ecrits. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. 671–702. Lacan, Jacques. Talking To Brick Walls (1971-’72) [2011]. Trans. Adrian R. Price. Medford, MA: Polity, 2017. Lacan, Jacques. “Variations on the Standard Treatment [1955].” In Ecrits. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. 269–302. Lacey, Cherie. To Settle the Settler: Pathologies of Colonialism in New Zealand History Films, 19252005. PhD dissertation. The University of Auckland, 2010. Lenoble, Alex. How to Occupy the Real: Postcolonial Literatures beyond Representation. PhD dissertation. Cornell University, 2019. López, Alfred J. “The Gaze of the White Wolf: Psychoanalysis, Whiteness, and Colonial Trauma.” In Postcolonial Whiteness: A Critical Reader on Race and Empire. Ed. Alfred J. López. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. 155–81. Massad, Joseph A. Islam in Liberalism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015. McGeachan, Cheryl. “‘Worlding’ Psychoanalytic Insights: Unpicking R. D. Laing’s Geographies.” In Psychoanalytic Geographies. Eds. Paul Kingsbury and Steve Pile. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. 89–102. Okinogi, Keigo. “Psychoanalysis in Japan.” In Freud and the Far East: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on the People and Culture of China, Japan, and Korea. Ed. Salman Akhtar. Lanham, MD: Jason Aronson, 2009. 9–25. Pandolfo, Stefania. Knot of the Soul: Madness, Psychoanalysis, Islam. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018. Parker, Ian. Japan in Analysis: Cultures of the Unconscious. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Pedwell, Carolyn. Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Pomer, Sidney L. “Max Eitingon 1881-1943: The Organization of Psychoanalytic Training.” In Psychoanalytic Pioneers [1966]. Eds. Franz Alexander, Samuel Eisenstein and Martin Grotjahn. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1995. 51–62. Prakash, Gyan. “Introduction.” In After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements. Ed. Gyan Prakash. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. 3–17. Prakash, Gyan. “Postcolonial Criticism and Indian Historiography.” Social Text 31/32 (1992): 8–19. Roudinesco, Elisabeth. Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France 1925-1985 [1986]. Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman. London: Free Association Books, 1990. Schechter, Kate. Illusions of a Future: Psychoanalysis and the Biopolitics of Desire. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Thakur, Gautam Basu. Postcolonial Lack: Identity, Culture, Surplus. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2020. Truscott, Ross and Derek Hook. “The Vicissitudes of Anger: Psychoanalysis in the Time of Apartheid.” In Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism. Eds. Matt Ffytche and Daniel Pick. London: Routledge, 2016. 193–204. Young, Robert J. C. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. Second Edition. London: Routledge, 2004.

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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Worlding Women ROBIN TRUTH GOODMAN

The premise of Margaret Atwood’s 2015 novel The Heart Goes Last is ridiculous: the novel attempts to envision what reproduction looks like “scaled up” for global commodity expansion but can only do so through absurdities and contradictions. Starting in a city gutted by financial crises, mass homelessness, unemployment, and pollution, the two main characters, the hardworking upwardly mobile Stan and Charmaine, having lost their house to foreclosure, are living in their car, threatened by roving urban gangs, when they volunteer to go to the corporate prison Consilience/Positron, signing a life contract; there, initially happy, they soon unwittingly fall in with human-organ traffickers, euthanizing bureaucracies, makers of schlock, and Elvis and Marilyn impersonating sex-robot-escorts in Las Vegas who, though at first tormenting them, ultimately assist them toward a resolution of happy marriage in the suburbs with a baby, which they always wanted. It is no wonder that the novel has received almost no critical attention, even at a time when Margaret Atwood herself has again been honored with explosive accolades on both the literary and popular culture scenes for her other recent forays. Nevertheless, this novel, like Atwood’s other novels, has keyed into undertheorized issues and concerns embedded in the public unconscious. Like Atwood’s other novels—The Handmaid’s Tale, its sequel, her second Man Booker prize winner, The Testaments, the Oryx and Crake trilogy, and even her first Man Booker prize winner, The Blind Assassin—The Heart Goes Last is a novel about reproduction. By “reproduction,” I do not intend to draw a line between biological bodies that replicate themselves through “natural” processes on the one side and, on the other, social and cultural processes ensuring that everyone continues to be put in a place within the relations of production. The division between, on the one hand, the reproduction of bodies, “free” work taking refuge in the home away from the violence of economic and political turmoil, and, on the other, the reproduction of the social system, has been a fervent and vexed point of feminist engagement and contention,1 from activists like Selma James, who advocated for paid housework, to writers like Shulamith Firestone, who insisted that babies be cultivated in test-tube laboratories in order to free women from the burdens of domestic life, to analyses like Donna Haraway’s, which acknowledge that economic and technological forces were always extrapolating surplus from “women’s work” that was devalued in its ideological separation from commodified labor, depressing the wages of labor as its reserve army. If the job of social reproduction is to reproduce the race, class, and gender hierarchies that distribute bodies for the maximal output of the global productive system, then the job of reproducing bodies is no different than the job of reproducing social subjects. The ideological separation of biological and social reproduction has been troubling for feminism, and their undeniable entwinement must be a foundational point of engagement

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for any feminist future. Especially in the current climate with scientific interventions like gene and hormone therapy, gender reassignment, tissue implants, prostheses, erectile dysfunction remedies, early viability, fertility drugs, commercial surrogacy, and the ubiquity of pornography, the idea that the biological and the social reproduction of subjects could be mutually exclusive in any legible way—or that one is more “original”—has become all but mute, and the idea that biology somehow provides a primary natural bonding between infants and parents for the purposes of socialization has been refuted.2 As Paul Preciado puts it, “the present technological revolution, marked by genetic manipulation, nanotechnology, the technologies of communication, logistics, pharmacology, and artificial intelligence, impacts the processes of reproducing life. In the current industrial mutation, the body and sexuality occupy the place occupied by the factory in the nineteenth century.”3 He goes on: “Homosexuality and heterosexuality, intersexuality and transsexuality do not exist outside of a colonial, capitalist epistemology, which privileges the sexual practices of reproduction as a strategy for managing the population and the reproduction of labor, but also the reproduction of the population of consumers. It is capital, not life, that is being reproduced.”4 Nevertheless, a symbolic association with women, the natural, or the biological still seems, often ironically, to create a sense of inferiority, alienation, and uncapturability within the logic of the global commodity and the made-world. Commodification needs the alienation of nature, as Horkheimer and Adorno once argued, “to break the compulsion of nature by breaking nature”5; that is, the commodity sets up nature as a resistance to commodification in order to conquer nature and prove the commodity’s total domination. “As representative of nature, woman in bourgeois society,” they specify, “has become an enigma of irresistibility and powerlessness. Thus she reflects back the vain lie of power, which substitutes the mastery over nature for reconciliation with it.”6 Production absorbs nature by dominating women (or “women’s work”), appearing to reconcile with irreconcilable nature. The Heart Goes Last brings up questions about how capitalism reproduces reproduction as different, and therefore more originary, more natural, and more secure. There are stakes in the ideological meaning reproduction takes on in its commodity form. In its attributions of naturalness and essentialness, reproduction appears as unequal to commodification with its roots in the productive muscularity of the made-world, weak in relation to it. “[B]ringing up kids in decent conditions,” Virginie Despentes decries, “is almost impossible. It is essential that women feel like failures. … We are held responsible for a failure that is in fact collective and cross-gender.”7 In its many different versions, both feminist and anti-feminist, the old dream of mechanizing reproduction is a dream about removing women’s bodies from the reproductive process because women’s bodies, in whatever their form and derivation, introduce inequality and vulnerability as a disturbance at the heart of the commodity’s project. Nevertheless, as Despentes points out, women will be blamed for the failure of the commodity to deliver on its promises. In line with Atwood’s contentious self-assessment that “I am not a writer of science fiction,” The Heart Goes Last acknowledges that technologies are already inside of reproduction, but reproduction’s appearances in these global apparatuses look defamiliarized and disassociated, as slapstick, as divergence.8 Since Consilience/Positron can manufacture objects for desire, for example, the characters eroticize blue-knitted stuffed animals mass-produced by prison labor. His coprisoner Budge informs Stan that clients can choose add-ons to install in the robots’ consciousness mechanism, but only if the flushing and sanitation mechanisms do not malfunction, and the lube is appropriately applied. Budge lists standard add-ons: W, he says, is “for Welcoming … But sort of neutral, like a flight attendant. T+H is Timid and

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Hesitant, L+S is for Lustful and Shameless. A+B is for Angry and Belligerent,”9 and so on. The contemporary body, as current feminist scholarship understands it, is marked “cyborg”— it calculates pain and pleasure through its connectivity to technologies, pharmaceuticals, and information collected through constant surveillance and circulation; it is the body made as data. Yet, the illusion of control that the apparatus insists on, where lust or shame are codes that can be assembled to “scale up” and copied multiple times identically, is at the same time laughable, constantly rendered inefficient, and undermined by the same failing technologies that make such manufacture possible. Even as critical theory has had an unfriendly and shaky relationship with the subject whose universalizing and imperializing tendencies have subordinated differences, appropriated culture, stigmatized strangers, and dominated nature, Atwood raises the question of surrendering the subject to an organization of capital that thrives on subjectlessness. This chapter teases out the troubling that reproduction presents when absorbed within world reproductive processes of commodification and mechanization, as Atwood speculates.10 In this analysis, the naturalized body is the realization of what Mark Fisher calls “capitalist realism,”11 where capitalism has been made to seem like the only reality possible: the naturalized body is the resting ground for the sprawling contradictions that reproduction is unleashing culturally as the status of the biological is increasingly indistinguishable from global inhuman practices of calculation, public disinvestment, and appropriation for accumulation. The Heart Goes Last tells a tale of reproduction that, articulated as “world” commodification, shows the precarity in this relationship: subject reproduction is irreconcilable with its absorption into “world” production and forces inequalities into a world built ideologically on equalities of exchange. This chapter is divided into two parts. The first part discusses the contradictions of reproductive politics taken over by the multinational commodification of life itself; the second part addresses the contradictions involved in current theorizations of “world” in world literature criticism with respect to the reproduction of subjects.

REPRODUCTION “SCALED UP” AS GLOBAL COMMODITY Atwood’s failure to reconcile reproduction with the commodity is worth taking seriously because it foregrounds a significant feature of our neoliberal moment. The Heart Goes Last describes the world engineered in Consilience as technologizing reproduction in a vast bureaucracy, branded for ripe investment, and with no viable outside. Contradictions between reproduction and capital were already outlined by Rosa Luxemburg when she says: “The natural propagation of the workers and the requirements of accumulating capital are not correlative in respect of time or quantity. Marx himself has most brilliantly shown that natural propagation cannot keep up with the sudden expansive needs of capital.”12 Though, as Luxemburg remarks, reproduction was always a problem for capital by putting limits on its accumulation (particularly with respect to time delays), neoliberalism changes the equation, making reproduction into a direct source of global profit. Rather than production depending on the controlled distributions of natural birth as instigating time delays in the productive cycle, as Luxemburg as well as Marx observed, consumption depends on reproduction’s abilities to literalize social identities onto bodies. Yet, as Rosalyn Diprose and Ewa Ziarek have noted, in liberal democracies, an “intensification of hostility towards immigrants and refugees [is] usually accompanied by attempts to restrict women’s reproductive self-determination,”13 suggesting that reproduction is still incompatible

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with the profit strategies of world production’s timeliness. Instead of understanding the life of the laboring body required for accumulation as Luxemburg explained it, Atwood envisions world remaking through assembly reproductions of pre-programmed, duplicable human parts and sexual desires open to media saturation, excitement, surveillance, profit strategies, and control, as surplus in a world no longer constructed through labor but through consumption. In The Heart Goes Last, Atwood notices the logic of accumulation inside of the reproduction of consuming subjects while, at the same time, seeing reproduction and world production as still completely, and hilariously, at odds. The Heart Goes Last depicts new institutions arising to contain and warehouse subjects to extract data from their experience, with the subject conditioned as data mine for the purpose of reduplication and sale. In The Heart Goes Last, the prison Positron is connected to a town Consilience, an investment project with national and global pretensions in the business of producing and reproducing subjects. Victims of the economic and ecological collapse “choose” to self-incarcerate (five years before the coronavirus made world populations do just that). The volunteers come to live in what was once a disciplinary institution used to house criminals before it got generalized and gentrified. Before this, “prisoners were rented out as unpaid labour to international business interests,”14 but soon the planners find more reliable income in capitalizing on full employment, surveillance, and security systems, selling body parts, sentiment, and information, with a secret side project of selling customized sex robots called “Possibilibots,” free of regulation for global circulation, to meet whatever desire or fetish the market could drum up. Possibilibots’ assembly lines replicate bodies based on a type of realism, modeled on unaware prisoners, but also they replicate the full menu of subjective responses in experimental engineering departments specialized in Empathy and Expression for floor performances, celebrity, casinos, and shopping malls but also for the very particular sexual tastes of their elite clientele. The only way to escape from Positron is to impersonate one of the dolls, matching up their biometrics, don an Elvis outfit (for example), and ship out in a coffin. Atwood shows capital operating at the level of life, abstracting life into exchangeable units and turning the laboring body into a body made into a docile thing— or identity—in the interests of profitable extraction for sale and investment. As would be expected, a good portion of the criticism on Atwood focuses on abortion and reproductive politics, particularly in how population collapse leads to an authoritarian takeover of reproduction.15 Recent critics have read The Handmaid’s Tale as celebrating “reproductive futurism,” or the idea of a hegemonic future of unfettered growth secured in the image of the naturalized white child who promises the continuance of the gender binary system, its inequalities, and its genetically replicating lineages.16 Sophie Lewis, for example, faults Atwood for re-naturalizing motherhood, where Atwood treats surrogacy as an authoritarian imposition, an alienating intervention into what otherwise would be a natural, freely chosen relationship.17 For Lewis, radical feminists or pro-natalists who read The Handmaid’s Tale as a warning against right-wing patriarchal ideologies of the Reagan era do not always see how the naturalized reproduction in the context of the biologized family that The Handmaid’s Tale calls for itself reinforces the naturalization of conservative norms of race, ethnicity, gender, and alienated labor that sustain global inequality within an ideological privileging of infinite growth.18 Reproduction, she adds, was never outside the demands of the technologized workforce. “Your children are not your children,”19 Lewis reprises, because “[t]he regime of quasi-compulsory ‘motherhood,’ while vindicating itself in reference to an undifferentiated passing-on of ‘life itself,’ is heavily implicated in the structures that stratify human beings in terms of their biopolitical value in present societies.”20 For Lewis, Atwood’s

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liberalism assumes that the remedy for Gilead’s political overreach is in women’s “natural” bounty liberated on its post-authoritarian “outside” (say, Canada). In contrast, The Heart Goes Last puts liberalism at the center and shows that liberalism has gone horribly wrong. Instead of the “naturalized” future child being endangered by politics, authoritarian or otherwise, desire is made to thrive, infinitely, as (authoritarian) market culture. As Positron is “self-sustaining,”21 for example, each job—like Stan’s tending chickens—is really a useless “make-work job”22 with the real goal of enhancing profitable desire, so that Stan’s coop turns into a chicken rental market for horny men. The plot does not allow that an unadulterated “natural” child is rescuable from the evils of scientific, political, or commercial management in a flight to a liberalism by the name of Canada. This theme of reproduction’s place in all-things-marketable is even apparent in The Handmaid’s Tale and the Oryx and Crake trilogy but only on the margins, as Rebecca Sheldon points out, where, “other-than-human liveliness,” “a reserve of vibrant potentiality,” living energies, or, at the molecular level, “somatic capacities” can be patented and traded or turned into expensive remedies for secretly implanted diseases, disrupting the biological stability of the figure of the child by corrupting its parts.23 The Heart Goes Last goes even further in dismantling liberalism’s assumed oppositions between autonomous bodies and political technologies as well as in dismantling the body of the worker as where production splits from its private reproductive demands (division of labor). The novel envisions a centralized technological system organized to animate “choice” in order to extract value from it. This could constitute a feminist euphoria, with reproduction no longer residing in the birthing body in situations that feminists from Simone de Beauvoir to Shulamith Firestone identified as confining women to biological functions and inferiority. Yet, unlike in The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood here presents the line between the “inside” and “outside” of technology’s authority as a technological trick. Whereas, in The Handmaid’s Tale, Canada will set you free, in The Heart Goes Last, Charmaine and Stan, first on the outside, find that “[s]leeping in the car is cramped”24 while they still feel “lucky”25 to have a car at all before they send themselves to prison. Capital has drifted on, becoming increasingly autonomous from its former role in creating local conditions to assure reproduction (austerity). Yet, the choice of joining the corporate community of Consilience does not offer reprieve as the corporate malfeasance and destruction of nature on the “outside” of Consilience blend into the destruction of human nature on the “inside” of its reproductive apparatus as Charmaine and Stan, now free, self-incarcerate. Consilience’s practices—or malpractices—control subjective construction, as though subjects, like Elvis sex-bots, are part of a network of assembly where resources are extracted from the most intimate and personal of experiences only because they already are inside of an exchange chain. Once in Consilience, for example, clients are given a house for their one month in the town and share the house with another couple that lives there during the following month when the client is incarcerated. Eventually aware that the houses are built as part of the company’s surveillance networks, these couples are exchangeable with each other, particularly in their replication of a desire to love and be loved by the company through its representatives. One day a month, while they are switching sides, Charmaine rides her bike into a housing development—a relic from the town’s agricultural past of Quaker sugar-beet production, then its industrial past of auto production, and finally its financial foreclosures— now crumbling but also under renovation plans for infinite project expansion; there, she fucks Max, Stan’s Alternate, who turns out to be a surveillance operative. Observing and manipulating Charmaine’s “secret” meetings with Max, and then Stan’s hooking up with

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Charmaine’s Alternate Jocelyn, allow Consilience to collect information on and ultimately sell erotic tastes and desires, even TV dramas. They can, as the CEO Ed brags, “wipe out your previous love object and imprint you with a different one”26 by a “little operation” that rewires your brain to agree to “whatever sexual use”27 with the first object you see upon waking. Eventually, “like a superdildo, only with a body attached,”28 the desires can be engineered onto the skin or exoskeletons, the facial expressions and breathing patterns, the computer-chip memories, body heat, heartbeats, and goosebumps of “slut machines”29 made from Chinese parts, customized, and exported to places like Holland, Vegas, or other sites replete with “cheap-bot shop[s].”30 As Charmaine and Stan choose to enroll in Consilience’s financial scheme of reproduction,31 The Heart Goes Last makes us wonder in what sense reproductive “choice” can exist in relation to the total commodity that takes on an authoritarian character not unlike Gilead’s. As the novel’s prototype of choice, Charmaine’s prison job is to pull the switch to kill prisoners—at first “the worst criminals, the incorrigibles,”32 but eventually Charmaine is not so sure, though she still chooses to pull the switch, and quite happily, proud that she is doing her job well. It soon becomes clear that the purpose of the Positron Project is to collect “income from body parts … [o]rgans, bones, DNA, whatever’s in demand … There’s a big market for transplant market among aging millionaires, no?”33 and Stan is to become a source. The business of worldmaking in Consilience/Positron is to select the traits to reproduce humanity’s future or, in Hannah Arendt’s terms, to determine which future people with whom “to share the earth,” “who should and who should not inhabit the world,”34 but with an eye to commercialization. “The next hot thing is going to be babies’ blood,” Charmaine is told. “There’s no shortage” on getting babies. “People leave them lying around.”35 Naturalized as it merges with the machine, “choice” here does not delineate an area of liberal autonomy that the state contracts with the citizen but rather a principle of selection that is not natural or racial but caught inside the interests of commodity-life markets that “improve” product by killing the surplus. Yet, that is not all, because even death cannot escape Consilience’s global pretensions. In fact, despite the reference to the natural state of death carried already in the title The Heart Goes Last, death is not necessarily death but rather an investment opportunity. Charmaine “chooses” to obey orders and kill Stan on Valentine’s Day. However, such killing does not affect a natural death but rather initiates a data transfer. The questions raised in the title about the status of the natural-biological—is the heart already gone? Yet to go? On the verge? Does it ever really go?—are raised in the end as a question of will, or “choice”: lodged pleasantly in her suburban home, Charmaine is asked by her Alternate, the surveillance operative Jocelyn, if, in the face of the commodity’s addictive seduction, “You want your decisions taken away from you so you won’t be responsible for your own actions?”36 and Charmaine stutters. “She might as well not have any head at all,”37 she laments. Does Charmaine “love” Stan, now an Empathy adjuster for Possibilibots; does she or did she ever have a heart if the Positron implanted her desire in a data transfer, and what, then, is the status of the baby Winnie who is the product of a data breach? Not only are the naturalizing categories of reproduction bankrupt, but also the happy suburban ending that Charmaine and Stan choose seems like a joke, coming as it does tacked onto a story about species end and the manufactured survival of artificial subjectivity and naturalized bodies. As Sophie Lewis remarks, “If it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, it is still perhaps easier to imagine the end of capitalism than the end of the family.”38 Atwood imagines the end of imagining the family by imagining the family’s unimaginability within the totally madeworld of the commodity and then falls back into the traditional, naturalized categories of

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social reproduction to cover up their unmaking, exposing their absurdity and underscoring their alienation, their irreconcilability. In an update of Luxemburg’s observations, Atwood’s book underscores the total alienation of any naturalized social reproduction and yet our continual recourse to such emptied-out symbolic categories. The next section considers how, within world literature criticism, social reproduction continues to be out of synch with its appropriation in the worldly imaginaries of commodified global production.

REPRODUCTION IN WORLD LITERATURE TIME Atwood’s idea of commodity reproduction is not exactly new. As Hortense Spillers famously pointed out, the commodification of reproduction can be traced to the slave trade: “[t]he captive female body locates precisely a moment of converging political and social vectors that mark the flesh as a prime commodity of exchange,”39 and Imani Perry agrees that “Black women’s bodies became the economic engine of the slave economy in the United States”40 and therefore underlie the development of the modern economy. Alienation through the commodification of reproduction continues within different forms of mechanization and industrialization. As Janelle Taylor, for example, explains, The fetishism of commodities, according to Marx, consists in the social magic of capitalism, through which “value” is attributed to objects as if it were a power mysteriously inhering in them … Fetishism of the fetus consists in attributing to it value as “life,” as if this were a property magically inhering in the fetus alone, in a manner that obscures the fact that the continued vitality of any actual fetus depends utterly and completely upon its continued sustenance by the woman who carries it.41 Thus, as Sophie Lewis concludes, “the fetus becomes a commodity in people’s minds regardless of whether the pregnancy is commercial.”42 Reproduction occurs within a circuit of exchange that divides the body into parts, treating parts of the body as zones of extraction and technological output. As Melinda Cooper demonstrates, “[T]he expansion of commercial processes into the sphere of ‘life itself’ has a troubling effect on the self-evidence of traditional economic categories.”43 “The biotech revolution,” she goes on, “is the result of a whole series of legislative and regulatory measures designed to relocate economic production at the genetic, microbial, and cellular level so that life becomes, literally, annexed within capitalist processes of accumulation.”44 Commodified, life itself is, Cooper elaborates, a composite of artificial intelligence, code sources, organ transplants, tissue development, and regeneration technologies, both financial and scientific, that, using chance applications, replicate in machines the processes involved in the making of life. “What regenerative medicine wants to elicit,” she writes—as well as market—“is the generative moment from which all possible forms can be regenerated—the moment of emergence, considered independently of its actualizations.”45 This is happening, she notes, at the global level and affects global trade rules as well as intellectual property laws relating to pharmaceuticals, agribusiness, and biotech, which have to be redesigned in the face of a coming-to-awareness that infinite growth through productive extraction is coming up against ecological limits. Techno-futurism has therefore noted the political necessity of “scaling up” reproduction, and feminism has picked up on the potential. As Helen Hester has explained, social reproduction takes place on a “primarily local”46 and largely autonomous plane that is

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restricted in scale.47 Feminism needs, says Hester, to “re-engineer the world,”48 specifically by understanding domestic labor-saving devices and other reproductive innovations like pharmaceuticals, information, digitality, and software as integrated in social systems that shape sociopolitical and material futures both inside and outside the limited spheres of the biological.49 Yet Atwood’s take on the commodification of reproduction interrogates the limits in submitting reproduction to the logic of the commodity that is “scaled up” and globalized. The irreconcilability of reproduction within the logic of the “world” commodity gives life a precarious existence inside an idea of commodity (production) that has been historically if ideologically constructed through exclusions of reproduction. In this, Atwood contributes to a world literature critique that similarly envisions the commodifying pretensions of reproduction, life, and subject formation in a precarious relation to a world described in global commodity terms. In world literature criticism, a debate has taken shape over context, where the survival and reproduction of local culture are precarious under the stronger “scaled up” imperialism that relegated the cultural locality to a subordinate and unequal status, an order of power that now needs to be corrected. Such a debate focuses on whether the terms for describing literary history are adequate to the varieties of particularized cultures and identities that compose “world,” or whether “world” should rather be thought as a group of identifiable themes and motifs that are abstracted for easier counting, comparison, and exchange. Most famously, Franco Moretti talks about “the sheer enormity”50 of world literature’s task, and controversially insists that new searchable, computational, and comparable categories and methods for literary history and analysis have to be developed that turn away from the particularity of a single closelyread text in order to address grand systems of flow, circulation, and influence.51 World literature criticism has sought to construct a vocabulary for thinking about the relationship between the immediate, the intimate, and experiential of (indigenous) social relations (“the sensuous particularity of the text”52 in Hitchcock’s terms), on the one side, and, on the other, the commodity that can be identified, under market globalization, through its abstractions, countable motifs, and “scaling up.” Words like “world,” “translation,” and “planetary”53 have been used to preserve the local, mostly buried under the domination of the commodity, just as “life” and its link to nature acquire a nostalgic gloss in Atwood’s big picture. “But he himself has been cut out of the photo,”54 laments Stan sadly as he observes a photo-model—taken at their honeymoon—of Charmaine’s head being duplicated into a sex-bot. “Don’t they—don’t these women care about their earlier lives? Don’t they resent—.”55 He later thinks, looking at himself dressed up as Elvis, “Is that all we are? … Unmistakable clothing, a hairstyle, a few exaggerated features, a gesture?”56 As Hitchcock foregrounds, “the local comes sharply into view”57 before the speeding up of world commodity circulation, yet in Atwood’s speculative life-factory, an alienated nature comes into view only in those moments of hesitation or ellipsis where the characters fleetingly remember a something else, another culture, that does not quite fit. The world of world literature is caught in a similar balancing act between the world and the body that feminists like Atwood have noted in social reproduction. Yet, world literature criticism has not discerned a place for thinking social reproduction inside its narratives or politicization. World literature finds the subject precariously abandoned in relation to the world’s scalability. For Kant, for example, the sublime, which he allegorizes as a hurricane, “cannot be contained in any sensible form,”58 being limitless and unrepresentable, “invisible forces that generate their own power,”59 a glimpse of “magnitude and might”60 that makes anything compared with it small and our capacity to resist it “an insignificant trifle in comparison

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with [those forces’] power.”61 “World,” as sublime, is an imaginative projection beyond the immediately observable, bigger than the sensible, even threatening to it, and invites an inventive extension of the mind and its ability to represent outside of comparatively minuscule empirical or local experience, mortality, and emotion: the subject made insecure by fear is then made secure by knowledge even as knowledge on that scale diminishes it. Today, imagining “world” and the demands of scale “world” entails in terms of space, time, and diversity is part of an ethical imperative to respond to global crises ranging from climate change to refugees, wars, pandemics, and inequality. In fact, if they cannot include an imaginary of “world” in the form of pandemics, environmental crises, resource depletion, or infinite growth (including imperialism and financialization), cultural theories will become increasingly unrecognizable. At the same time, while the subject in Kant overcomes his powerlessness by realizing his independence from and superiority over the challenge of magnitude to the categories of his reason, the contemporary subject, rather, understands “world” much more securely in line with Lukács’s description of the totality of the modern commodity, where quantity and calculation appear as inhuman, impenetrable, mechanical, often hostile objects that crush, dispossess, and disappear the bounded sensible subject. For Lukács, even social relations (sensuousness, use-value, the everyday) diminish before the commodity character of the totally administered society, which, like the sublime, turns everything into quantity. The worker, says Lukács, recognizes himself as commodity because he no longer keeps “the cloak of the living thing” beneath “the quantifying crust”62 of the commodity. This describes how Charmaine gets lured into choosing Consilience: during a downtime at the seedy café PixelDust where she works, having lost her job in geriatric care, Charmaine sees a man on TV directly speaking to her and “reading her mind”63: “Tired of living in your car?” the man on screen calls out. “Of course you are! … You deserve better,”64 and Charmaine, with the man looking directly into her eyes and inviting her into the ad, feels he knows she exists there. Here, in Lukácsian fashion, the subject is reproduced by identifying as the commodity that offers to absorb her, to scale her up and lift her out of the demolition of the local. The problem of thinking about social reproduction in “world” terms identifiable as feminist is that such “scaling up” of global circulation—including in data and information65—happens at the expense of the small, the local, the familial, the sensory, the raw, and the intimate (in short, the reproduction of culture and the embodied, socialized subject). Do the novel’s failures, like the characters’ stammers, allude obliquely to the commodity’s breaking points, to something called “nature” that they recognize as alienated in the commodity’s world? As she describes the “scaled up” commodity of reproduction, Atwood’s plotlines come up against an irreducibility, an interruption seeming like a memory or a something else. What the commodity cannot hold is what may once have been called nature, or feeling, or time, or planetariness, or sociality but in any case, it suggests that social reproduction poses limits to the commodity’s grasp. Formerly gathered in the term “woman,” these other unutterable sensibilities, alienated before the commodity, stand precariously on the edge of a cliff, waiting to be overtaken by a dangerous magnitude. The reproduction of subjects, according to world literature criticism, cannot totally fall under the terms of the commodity without contradicting it. World literature criticism understands “time” as a placeholder for this difference. Rob Nixon, for example, poses the imperative of much slower timeframes, “neither spectacular nor instantaneous but rather incremental and accretive,”66 to take account of the climate and other global problems like poverty. Likewise, Peter Hitchcock looks to literary seriality that “continues the work of decolonization by

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transnationalizing the time/space of its possibility,”67 or living on.68 Dipesh Chakrabarty also poses “natural reproductive life,”69 and not necessarily human life, as underlying the possibility of common responsibility that “world” demands. In its temporalizations, Pheng Cheah maintains, “world literature points to something that will always exceed and disrupt capital.”70 “[I]mmanent sociality of human life”—including birth—he adds, “is a power that makes worlds.”71 Similarly for Chakrabarty, “life” introduces into “world” an extension of time in the building of a multi-perspectival world dwelling. This dwelling truly and reliably appears, as Hannah Arendt specifies, when “we see all people suddenly behave as though they were members of one family, each multiplying and prolonging the perspective of his neighbor.”72 Here, as a disturbance in commodity-world, “family,” as a feminist like Atwood acknowledges, is also a metaphoric placeholder, perhaps an imagined future for a rich array of relationships and associations—relating, sharing, dwelling, recognizing, loving, and living. Seeming to reconcile the global commodity with worldly nature, reproduction— irreconcilable—reflects back in “women’s nature” the vain lie of power. In taking up reproduction as a global issue, Atwood’s novel exposes that the terms and narratives for imagining global power are irreconcilable with the sensible subject. The scaling up of “world” leaves subjects precarious before the commodity’s magnitude by leaving some part of them unavailable, as alienated surplus. The precarity of subjects saturates contemporary politics, from the privatization of schooling that turns schools into mechanisms for reproducing class society and increasing economic polarization to cuts in the social safety net, austerity policies, and immigrant detention that breaks up families. Atwood’s characters show the persistence of relations between subjects that the forces of globalization relegate to the dustbin of history: the small, the local, the socially relatable, the heart. The failures of The Heart Goes Last to reconcile the work of reproduction with global production, the ridiculousness of such a narrative, may indicate a subjective distancing, a hesitation toward the commodity’s invitation to welcome us or rescue us from the destruction it is causing. The point of Atwood’s narrative is not, then, so much the ridiculous plotline, the comical scenes, or the shallow characters who are so easily duped, but the underside, the ellipses, where the unsaid is inappropriable within the narrative’s terms and, as such, breaks into the narrative with an allusion toward something else.

NOTES 1 See, for example, Sophie Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism against the Family (London: Verso, 2019). Lewis writes: “If feminists want to denaturalize the gender of reproductive work more generally, we have to stop (re-)imposing gender on gestation and gestators in particular” (24). Also, she explains how the institution of the family replicates not only bourgeois sensibilities but also “racially and ethnically marked identities, and expressing the organized regulatory violence known as gender” (Full Surrogacy Now, 118). 2 Sophia Lewis, for example, notes that biological reproduction under capitalism often does the opposite, severing social bonds instead of affirming them: “When and how does gestation under capitalism generate … an absence of bonds between infants and adults; a genuine wish … not to mother the infant you’ve borne? … A sense of alienation from the baby, and even dislike or disgust, is a massively common experience” (Full Surrogacy Now, 123). Lewis believes that the only difference between surrogacy and what we think of as natural pregnancy is the wage (44): “Work is alienated labor, and it seems safe to say that … the vast majority of human gestation is at least somewhat alienated in a world in which people of all classes are equally free to starve”

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(Full Surrogacy Now, 74–5). Lewis uses examples like the technologization of all birth, not just surrogacy, the need for social supports like migrant workers for childcare assistance and schools, as well as the way children are often seen as commodities—investments for the future, branded products, scientifically and legally contracted (Full Surrogacy Now, 18). 3 Paul B. Preciado, An Apartment on Uranus: Chronicles of the Crossing, trans. Charlotte Mandell (South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2018), 40. 4 Ibid., 29. 5 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzeline Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 9. 6 Ibid., 56. 7 Virginie Despentes, King Kong Theory (New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2009), 21. 8 Margaret Atwood, “The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake in Context,” PMLA 119.3 (2004): 513. 9 Margaret Atwood, The Heart Goes Last (New York: Anchor Book, 2015), 240. 10 Catherine Rottenberg has also noted that neoliberalism’s dominant political imaginary is troubled by reproduction. For Rottenberg, liberal democracies exist through a division of space between private and public domains, and because neoliberalism “has neither lexicon nor framework for addressing unwaged work or activity within the family” (Catherine Rottenberg, The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism [New York: Oxford University Press, 2018], 100), “reproduction has presented a quandary and a ‘remainder’” (Catherine Rottenberg, The Rise of Neoliberalism, 101). My conclusion is different. I do not think that liberalism ever succeeded in keeping private and public domains separated except ideologically and symbolically for the purposes of materially distributing bodies in space, and so neoliberalism is less a takeover of formerly private domains than a reconfiguration of private domains so that value can be extracted from them more intensely. We cannot realistically claim that Hobbes’s contract explains how power worked through a gendered division of labor until the twentieth century ushered in markets in immigrant domestic labor and technologies to ease household management and care. 11 In a rare through brief mention of The Heart Goes Last in criticism, Annika Gonnermann characterizes the novel in this way: “The protagonists … make themselves comfortable within the conceptual limits offered by the system” (Annika Gonnermann, “The Concept of Post-Pessimism in 21st Century Dystopian Fiction,” The Comparatist 43 [October 2019]: 37). 12 Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, trans. Agnes Schwarzchild (London: Routledge, 2003), 341. 13 Rosaluyn Diprose and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, Arendt, Natality and Biopolitics: Toward Democratic Plurality and Reproductive Justice (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 1. 14 Atwood, The Heart Goes Last, 47. 15 Heather Latimer, for example, understands The Handmaid’s Tale as a critique of the terms of the “pro-choice” position that accepts the “pro-life” assumption that women’s rights and fetal rights are opposed: “The Handmaid’s Tale is a text which reveals how reproductive laws based on ideas of ‘privacy,’ freedom,’ and ‘choice’ can become circular. That is, these terms can just as easily be used to strip women’s rights as they can be used to strip women’s rights as they can be used to grant them … [I]t also offers a critique of statutory abortion reforms themselves, such as Roe v. Wade, reminding us that they are compensatory at best” (Heather Latimer, “Popular Culture and Reproductive Politics: Juno, Knocked Up and the Enduring Legacy of The Handmaid’s Tale,” Feminist Theory 10.2 [2009]: 214). Anne Balsamo writes: “Atwood’s novel provided a sharply focused lens through which to view the emerging situation of women of reproductive age in the U.S.” (Anne Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996], 112). Balsamo is concerned with how, following the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade,

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the development of new reproductive technologies increasingly pitted women’s rights against fetal rights and have subjected women to surveillance and even criminalization. Balsamo’s analysis sits on the cusp of a new availability of surrogacy and 1980s controversies about addiction during the “Crack crisis,” and this perspective wants to rescue the biological woman from the scientific and political power exercise on her, focusing on the “technological isolation of the womb from the rest of the female body [that] promotes the rationalization of reproduction” and “the objectification and fragmentation of the female body” (Anne Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered Body, 91). More recent feminist perspectives like Lewis’s and Sheldon’s are less sanguine about presenting the female body as somehow outside or prior to technological, informational, commercial, and ideological interventions. 16 The idea of “reproductive futurism” is adapted from Lee Edelman’s No Future. In it, Edelman claims that politics is oriented around the figure of the child or reproductive futurism, which he thinks of as a limitation: “terms that impose an ideological limit on political discourse as such, preserving in the process the absolute privilege of heteronormativity by rendering unthinkable, but casting outside the political domain, the possibility of a queer resistance to this organizing principle of communal relation” (Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004], 2). In response, Edelman advocates rejecting politics, rejecting the future, rejecting opposition, and rejecting any positive identity. I find it surprising that so many feminist critics have turned to this doomsday psychoanalytic assessment, which, relying on a universalism of the subject, says that our psychic structures of fantasy determine our investment in certain status quo images of who we are as the psychic drives are always recaptured by the Symbolic. Though I find some of Edelman’s readings to be charming, I do not find the image of the Child to be as monolithic as Edelman seems to think. For example, images of the Child that are mobilized in politics include appeals to sympathize with immigrants, to curtail gun violence, to end wars, to mobilize against police shootings, to fund public education, and to take action against climate change. I do not find children to be always to be connected to heterosexual privilege—they are often, indeed, framed against privilege, abandoned by parents and other supports. Also, Edelman does not consider the image of the Child that he objects to in relation to gender, to women, or to feminized work, an odd omission since the Child mobilized by politics often is embedded in arguments about the status or nature of women. 17 “‘Surrogate,’ more than ‘reproductive’ or ‘feminized,’ might be a word that proves useful … in bringing together the millions of precarious and/or migrant workers laboring today as cleaners, nannies, butlers, assistants, cooks, and sexual assistants in First World homes, whose service is figured as dirtied by commerce, in contrast to the supposedly ‘free’ or ‘natural’ love-acts of an angelic white bourgeois femininity it in fact makes possible” (Sophie Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now, 56). 18 “My point is that the pleasures of an extremist misogyny defined as womb-farming risk concealing from us what are simply slower and less photogenic forms of violence, such as race, class, and binary gender itself” (Sophie Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now, 14). 19 Ibid., 153. 20 Ibid., 21. 21 Atwood, The Heart Goes Last, 80. 22 Ibid., 81. 23 Rebekah Sheldon, “Somatic Capitalism: Reproduction, Futurity, and Feminist Science Fiction,” Ada: A Journal of Gender New Media & Technology 3 (November 2013), https://adanewmedia.org/ issues/. 24 Atwood, The Heart Goes Last, 3. 25 Ibid., 3. 26 Ibid., 326. 27 Ibid., 328.

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28 Ibid., 310. 29 Ibid., 221. 30 Ibid., 239. “‘I don’t think they’ll ever replace the living and breathing,’” one character remarks. Another character answers, “‘They said that about e-books” (ibid., 222). 31 “You’re free to leave at any time,” they are told, “if you don’t like the ambience” (ibid., 38). 32 Ibid., 85. 33 Ibid., 157. 34 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 1963, 1964), 279. 35 Atwood, The Heart Goes Last, 158. 36 Ibid., 379. 37 Ibid., 342. 38 Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now, 119. 39 Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17.2 (Summer 1987): 75. 40 Imani Perry, Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 37. 41 Janelle S. Taylor. “A Fetish is Born: Sonographers and the Making of the Public Fetus,” Consuming Motherhood, eds. Janelle S. Taylor, Linda L. Layne, Danielle F. Wozniak (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 189. 42 Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now, 116. 43 Melinda Cooper, Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), 3. 44 Ibid., 19. 45 Ibid., 127. 46 Helen Hester, Xenofeminism (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), 104. 47 Ibid., 117. 48 Ibid., 9. 49 Hester is mainly addressing new technologies of reproduction that might be appropriated and repurposed for political resistance against the conservative gender norms affirmed in medical practice. 50 Franco Moretti, Distance Reading (London: Verso, 2013), 46. 51 Moretti said this was “meant as a joke” (Franco Moretti, Distance Reading, 44). 52 Peter Hitchcock, The Long Space: Transnationalism and Postcolonial Form (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 8. 53 Chakrabarty, for example, notes that “life acts as a self-regulatory system and plays a role in maintaining planetary conditions conducive to the continuation of life” (Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Human Condition in the Anthropocene,” The Tanner Lectures in Human Values [February 2015], https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/Chakrabarty%20manuscript.pdf, 167). Again, he sees “planetariness” as “our sense of having been decentered from the narratives that we ourselves tell of this place … ‘global warming’ is merely a very particular case of the more generic category of ‘planetary warming’ that, in its most general theory, has nothing to do with humans at all, for it has happened on this planet long before there were humans, just as it happens even on planets that have no life” (Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Human Condition in the Anthropocene,” 183). “Planetariness” is even more central to Moraru and Elias’ argument; they define it as a critique of globalization’s homogenizing processes in favor of a relationality: “an ethicization of the ecumenic process of coming together or ‘worlding’” (Christian Moraru and Amy J. Elias, “Introduction: The Planetary Condition,” The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century, eds. Amy J. Alias and Christian Moraru [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015], xii). As Moraru and Elias define it, “world” should be considered “a multicentric and pluralizing, ‘actually existing’ worldly structure of relatedness critically keyed to non-totalist, non-homogenizing, and anti-hegemonic operations typically and polemically subtended by an eco-logic” (Christian Moraru and Amy J. Elias,

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“Introduction,” xxiii). Other critics, as well, have pointed to breaks that “world” introduces into the logic of commodity. Chantal Mouffe asks if “the production of new subjectivities and the elaboration of new worlds” (Chantal Mouffe, Thinking the World Politically [London: Verso, 2013], 87) can “oppose the program of the total social mobilization of capitalism” (ibid., 87) by undermining “the social imaginary necessary for capitalist reproduction” (ibid., 88). Wai Chee Dimock does not think that capitalism is the only possibility for scaling up but also mentions “[t]he morphology of language,” some “categories of experience, such as beauty or death,” and civil society (Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008], 5). 54 Atwood, The Heart Goes Last, 240. 55 Ibid., 254. 56 Ibid., 269. 57 Hitchcock, The Long Space, 8. 58 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 129. 59 Ibid., 87. 60 Ibid., 130. 61 Ibid., 144. 62 Goerg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1971), 169. 63 Atwood, The Heart Goes Last, 35. 64 Ibid., 30. 65 Data and information, as Alexander Galloway has pointed out, exist “first and foremost as number” (Alexander Galloway, “Are Some Things Unrepresentable?” Theory, Culture, & Society 28.2 [2011], 88) that carries “no necessary information” (Alexander Galloway, “Are Some Things Unrepresentable?”, 89)— formal graphs and diagrams, disconnected from raw particulars. For Galloway, this particular tendency of world-imagining is the one meted out by military domination, a diagram of lines of influence, forces, and alliances that cancels out the sensible lives behind the data the way the Kantian subject overcomes his confusion and fear of the sublime. 66 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 2. 67 Hitchcock, The Long Space, 43. 68 Ibid., 26. 69 Chakrabarty, “The Human Condition in the Anthropocene,” 142. 70 Pheng Cheah, What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 11. 71 Ibid., 74. 72 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 58 (my emphasis).

WORKS CITED Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin Books, 1963, 1964. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. Atwood, Margaret. “The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake in Context.” PMLA 119.3 (2004): 513–517. Atwood, Margaret. The Heart Goes Last. New York: Anchor Books, 2015. Balsamo, Anne. Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996.

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Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Human Condition in the Anthropocene.” The Tanner Lectures in Human Values (February 2015). https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/Chakrabarty%20manuscript.pdf. Cheah, Pheng. What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Cooper, Melinda. Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008. Despentes, Virginie. King Kong Theory. New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2009. Dimock, Wai Chee. Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. Diprose, Rosalyn, and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek. Arendt, Natality and Biopolitics: Toward Democratic Plurality and Reproductive Justice. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Galloway, Alexander. “Are Some Things Unrepresentable?” Theory, Culture, and Society 28.7-8 (2011): 85–102. Gonnermann, Annika. “The Concept of Post-Pessimism in 21st Century Dystopian Fiction.” The Comparatist 43 (October 2019): 26–40. Hester, Helen. Xenofeminism. Cambridge: Polity, 2018. Hitchcock, Peter. The Long Space: Transnationalism and Postcolonial Form. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Ed. Gunzeline Schmid Noerr. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Ed. Paul Guyer. Trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Latimer, Heather. “Popular Culture and Reproductive Politics: Juno, Knocked Up and the Enduring Legacy of The Handmaid’s Tale.” Feminist Theory 10.2 (2009): 211–26. Lewis, Sophie. Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against the Family. London: Verso, 2019. Luxemburg, Rosa. The Accumulation of Capital. Trans. Agnes Schwarzchild. London: Routledge, 2003. Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1971. Moraru, Christian. “‘World,’ ‘Globe,’ ‘Planet’” Comparative Literature, Planetary Studies, and Cultural Debt after the Global Turn.” State of the Discipline Report: The 2014-2015 Report on the State of the Discipline of Comparative Literature, December 3, 2014. https://stateofthediscipline. acla.org/entry/%E2%80%9Cworld%E2%80%9D-%E2%80%9Cglobe%E2%80%9D%E2%80%9Cplanet%E2%80%9D-comparative-literature-planetary-studies-and-cultural-debt-after. Moraru, Christian, and Amy J. Elias. “Introduction: The Planetary Condition.” The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century. Eds. Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015. xi–xxxvii. Moretti, Franco. Distant Reading. London: Verso, 2013. Mouffe, Chantal. Thinking the World Politically. London: Verso, 2013. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Perry, Imani. Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Preciado, Paul B. An Apartment on Uranus: Chronicles of the Crossing. Trans. Charlotte Mandell. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2020. Rottenberg, Catherine. The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Sheldon, Rebekah. “Somatic Capitalism: Reproduction, Futurity, and Feminist Science Fiction.” Ada: A Journal of Gender New Media & Technology 3 (November 2013). https://adanewmedia.org/issues/. Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17.2 (Summer 1987): 64–81. Taylor, Janelle S. “A Fetish Is Born: Sonographers and the Making of the Public Fetus.” Consuming Motherhood. Eds. Janelle S. Taylor, Linda L. Layne, Danielle F. Wazniak. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. 187–210.

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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Worlding Gender VRUSHALI PATIL

What does “world” accomplish with regard to gender? The appending of world to gender helps us ask questions about the situated, knowledge-making practices that produce gender as an object of knowledge, identity, and politics. Theories on gender often skip over the ontology and epistemology of gender itself and move directly to theorizing gender inequality. A focus on the worldings of gender reorients us to gender. There are potentially multiple theoretical frameworks that can help us do this, including anti-racist feminisms, queer studies, and disability studies. In this chapter, I will highlight especially the contributions of anti-racist feminisms and critiques for worlding gender. I use “anti-racist” here as an umbrella term for the collective insights of diverse approaches that have centered race, including black, intersectional, and women of color feminisms; postcolonial, third world, transnational and decolonial feminisms, as well as African critiques. Critically, not every approach embraces the term “feminism” as will be discussed below. Anti-racist approaches are especially generative for interrogating gender itself, as they bring fundamental questions to the fore about (1) the ontological status of gender; (2) the positions or positionality from which hegemonic understandings of gender are worlded; and (3) most importantly, in the words of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the “epistemic violence” of located and situated worldings, which nonetheless represent themselves as universal.1 In what follows, I begin with what I call the imperial prehistories of the worlding of gender. Long before the concept of gender itself was actually articulated in the 1950s in the United States, a politics of embodiment, and related desires and identities, underwrote imperial and colonial expansion across the world. I call this politics the imperial prehistories of gender. I argue that the worldings of such processes, about apparently deviant practices and identities of various racialized others, are critical in the eventual articulation of gender as a concept itself. I then move onto the other worlds and other worldings of anti-racist approaches. These anti-racist approaches have emerged in the Global North and South, in response to the imperial genealogies of gender. I show thus how these counter-constructions challenge not just hegemonic worldings of gender but also the racial-imperial projects of which they are a part.

IMPERIAL PREHISTORIES AND THE WORLDING OF GENDER In an early essay, Spivak considers processes of worlding in the context of empire.2 Describing the British East India Company’s knowledge-making practices about India and the third world in this context of power, where even the native must in some sense take on the empire’s point of view, Spivak talks about epistemic violence. In her discussion of the Rani of Sirmur,

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further, Spivak highlights how imperial knowledge-making practices make the Rani visible in particular ways in order to advance the project of empire. For Spivak, the Rani shows up in the archives because of the role she is made to play in the East India Company’s imperial expansion. One key takeaway from this discussion is that empire and colonialism have worlded (racialized) women and gender in the process and service of their racial-imperial projects. If we consider the scope of such practices since the sixteenth century, it is difficult to deny that slavery, colonialism, and empire have been perhaps the central way in which racialized femininities and gender have been worlded, prompting decolonial philosopher Maria Lugones (discussed below) to call it the “colonial/modern gender system.”3 Indeed, elsewhere I have traced how proto-colonial and early colonial processes in fact create and circulate knowledge about other bodies, erotic practices, and identities, in ways which have deep consequences for the particular alignment of sex, gender, and sexuality in colonial metropoles, which Judith Butler eventually names the heterosexual matrix.4 I discuss how one of the major consequences of such worldings and their circulations is an emerging Enlightenmentera linearization of temporality and history, in which the “status of women” in different places becomes a central means for theorizing progress. For example, the Scottish conjectural theorist and proto-sociologist John Millar offers a stadial theory of societal development as gender and sexual development, in which the condition of women at savage and barbaric stages of development is opposed to their treatment at the highest stage of civilization, which is in Europe and particularly Britain. For Millar, at the most “savage” stage, people are so consumed with survival that they do not have the ability to develop sustained emotional connections with potential mates. Sex is unregulated, and women’s chastity has no value, rendering women of no value. Women are thus subjected to innumerable harms, from being abused as laborers to being treated as property. As societies develop, however, women’s sexuality becomes regulated, the value of women’s chastity increases, and ultimately, their value and treatment improve. Concomitantly, men’s dispositions also improve, from insufficient passions and cruelties of the savage to a civilized, genteel masculinity that sees a wife not as a slave but as a “friend and companion.”5 It is critical to note here that for Millar, women’s status has to do with “protection of” and “respect for” women’s chastity. His treatment thus relies on Western European patriarchal understandings about women’s sexuality, nature, and proper role. The patriarchal worlding of gender evident in Millar’s writing further produces the problematic of gender as intimately connected to a putative level of development, as well as male-female relations of power and inequality. Critically, this understanding of gender as progressive development from gender inequality to equality is consolidated in a colonial and comparative framework, in which imperial and colonial knowledges about aberrant practices around bodies, desires, and identities having to do with others from Africa, Asia, and the Americas are necessary. Thus this colonial and comparative framework worlds (patriarchal) gender as already transnational, relational, and racialized, showing the deep interconnections and interdependencies among Western European patriarchies, race, and empire. Additionally, in the imperial context, this imperial worlding is also deeply influential in shaping early northern feminist understandings of history, gender and feminism, or gender equality. The historian Antoinette Burton writes, for example, about the imperial feminists of the British Raj, who understood themselves as taking on the civilizing burden of uplifting their Indian sisters. Burton points to how, in taking on the civilizing mission in this way, such feminists in fact argued for a space for themselves in the empire and nation and made a case for their own citizenship.6

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When Spivak wrote about the gender politics of the worlding of India, she could not have meant the concept of gender itself—though she does use the term “gender”—but a specific construct of racialized femininity. As mentioned above, the concept of gender was not articulated until the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. The term was initially introduced in the 1950s to talk about socially constructed masculinity and femininity connected to sexed difference by the sexologist John Money in his research on intersex children. Feminists appropriated the term, especially after the 1970s.7 I explain in my forthcoming work, however, that the processes elaborated by authors such as Spivak, Burton, and others constituted the imperial prehistories of the eventual articulation of gender as a concept by northern sexologists, social scientists, feminists, and others in the following decades.8 While sexologists such as John Money had their own reasons for their projects, as did anthropologists, cross-cultural sociologists, development theorists, and others, northern feminists were especially keen to challenge power relations between men and women. One of the most well-known and since critiqued approaches used imperial worldings of third world others to posit a universal patriarchy that must be recognized and overturned. In a now-infamous volume, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1978), American feminist Mary Daly brought in examples of Chinese foot-binding, female genital mutilation in Africa, and other exoticized and racialized examples of women’s oppression in third world cultures to posit a universal oppression of women.9 Daly’s work is a good example of northern feminist appropriations of imperial knowledges of women’s oppressions in other cultures, produced in order to bolster civilizing missions, and to argue for universal patriarchy and universal sisterhood. Such universalizing feminist approaches have been amply critiqued (as will be discussed below). A second far less controversial feminist approach took up the distinction between biological sex and socially constructed gender, referencing variable constructions of femininities and masculinities across cultures to challenge essentialist arguments that bolstered hierarchical relations. One of the earliest examples of such an approach can be found in British sociologist Ann Oakley’s Sex, Gender and Society, first published in 1972.10 In this volume, Oakley takes up the distinction made between sex and gender by Money. She then draws on cross-cultural evidence, produced especially by anthropologists, to argue that women’s and men’s roles vary across cultures. Based on this variability, she argues that gender and gender roles are distinct from biological sex differences. Feminist work has been much more accepting of this social constructionist approach, even extending it to sex itself in subsequent works.11 And yet, critical to note here is that the “cross-cultural variability” produced by social scientists, which was so crucial to this feminist approach, was itself a product of imperial worldings of third world others and their “savage” and “barbaric” practices concerning women and gender. The translation of such worldings into mere cultural variability served to disappear empire even as it relied on empire.

OTHER WORLDS, OTHER WORLDINGS: “BEYOND SISTERHOOD IS STILL RACISM” Upon the publication of Gyn/Ecology in 1978, the black lesbian writer Audre Lorde famously penned an open letter to Mary Daly. In it, Lorde pointed to the invisibility and tokenization of black women and women of color in Daly’s work. She wrote:

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you were dealing with noneuropean women, but only as victims and preyers—upon each other. I began to feel my history and my mythic background distorted … What you excluded from Gyn/Ecology dismissed my heritage and the heritage of all other noneuropean women … To me, this feels like another instance of the knowledge, crone—ology and work of women of Color being ghettoized by a white woman dealing only out of a patriarchal western european frame of reference.12 Lorde then highlighted the significance of racism in the differential experiences of white women on the one hand and black women and women of color on the other: I ask that you be aware of how this serves the destructive forces of racism and separation between women—the assumption that the herstory and myth of white women is the legitimate and sole herstory and myth of all women to call upon for power and background, and that nonwhite women and our herstories are noteworthy only as decorations, or examples of female victimization. I ask that you be aware of the effect that this dismissal has upon the community of Black women and other women of Color … Within the community of women, racism is a reality force in my life as it is not in yours. The white women with hoods on in Ohio handing out KKK literature on the street may not like what you have to say, but they will shoot me on sight … beyond sisterhood is still racism.13 Lorde’s letter—as well as the larger body of her work—highlights key contentions and debates introduced by black women and women of color around hegemonic, white feminist worldings of gender. Indeed, as white, northern feminists articulated gender as socially constructed, in order to contest power relations between men and women, anti-racist feminisms would counter about the deep, racial amnesia of such worldings. Over the next several decades, black, indigenous, and other women of color in the Global North, as well as racialized women—from the perspective of the imperial prehistories of gender—across the Global South, would launch multiple critiques of the white, northern worlding of gender. Within the Global North, now iconic volumes such as Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Women, Race and Class, and Borderlands/La Frontera14 highlighted the experiences of African American, Latina, Asian American, and Native American women from a range of class positions and sexual subjectivities. Collectively, they critiqued the mainstream, white feminist movement’s emphasis on relations between men and women, which ignored the histories and legacies of slavery, colonialism, and empire, as well as factors such as classism and heterosexism. They called out what they saw as a false sense of sisterhood that ignored how such multiple relations of power complicated and shaped relations among women and among feminists. Indeed, they pointed out that the predominant focus on relations of power between men and women, to the detriment of other relations of power having to do with class, race, sexuality, and so on, could only be produced from a positionality privileged in relation to these other power relations. Their efforts eventually helped contribute to one of the most powerful critical theoretical-activist frameworks available for feminist analysis, intersectionality.15 From the Global South and across North and South, a number of additional anti-racist feminist approaches also emerged: postcolonial, third world, transnational, African, and decolonial approaches. Overlapping with the interventions elaborated above, these critiques additionally and variously emphasized the histories and legacies of North-South power

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relations. For example, postcolonial feminisms are concerned especially with colonial histories and their ongoing power in so-called postcolonial contexts. One central focus is how “other” or “native” women are made legible within colonial histories and colonial texts. In a seminal essay,16 for example, Spivak focuses on the figure of the subaltern South Asian woman. She examines how this figure is constructed on the one hand through British colonial discourses that produce her as a victim of violent religious or cultural practices and on the other hand, through “traditional” indigenous patriarchy, which produces her as a willing participating in said local practices. Ultimately, Spivak asks fundamental questions about Western imperial representational power and the ability of subaltern groups within colonial and postcolonial contexts to be able to represent themselves. Another key text in this field17 expands the focus to the simultaneous operation of race, class, gender, and sexuality within the Western imperial project, the fundamental role of these in the production of space, linear time, and progress, as well as the deep consequences for postcolonial nationalism. What eventually becomes termed third world feminism takes up many of these themes, but in a subsequent period of postcolonial state building, United Nations projects and prescriptions, US empire, and the ongoing hegemony of Western knowledge production. In a path-breaking 1984 essay,18 Chandra Mohanty takes up the aforementioned problematic of sisterhood from the perspective of Western feminist discourses’ production of the figure of the third world woman. In such discourses, Mohanty points out, This average third world woman leads an essentially truncated life based on her feminine gender (read: sexually constrained) and being “third world” (read: ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domestic, family-oriented, victimized, etc.). This, I suggest, is in contrast to the (implicit) self-representation of Western women as educated, modern, as having control over their own bodies and sexualities, and the freedom to make their own decisions.19 For Mohanty, this worlding of the third world woman constitutes a “discursive colonization.” Even more, the relatively free Western woman gains meaning in opposition to this oppressed Third World woman. In this sense, this oppressed, victimized Third World woman is productive of Western woman, even perhaps required for the consolidation of Western woman. A second 1991 volume further outlined Third World feminisms’ critiques of the parochialism of Western feminist visions of and for the “average” Third World woman.20 Rather, the essays in the volume outline Third World women’s agentic engagements with a simultaneity of struggles having to do with colonial histories and legacies, postcolonial states, global capitalism, colonizing knowledges, and so on. The essays cover a range of spaces in the Global South, and move more through the complexities of local contexts, interconnections, and coalitions. In the 1990s, a transnational feminist approach would build on such insights, emphasizing the significance of historical and ongoing cross-border relations of power. Problematizing a methodologically and theoretically nationalist focus on states, which inadvertently elided (or starkly narrowed) historical and contemporary cross-border relations having to do with empire, colonialism, and global capitalism, this approach recalled the significance of the transnational scale of analysis as well as the inter-penetration of the “local” and the “global.”21 Writers here focused on US empire in particular, including the global war on drugs, the war on terror, and militarism, as well as the global media environment for powerladen productions and circulations of gender.22

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Collectively, these anti-racist approaches have underscored that the experiences of racialized or othered women in the Global South (and North) are impacted by far more than putative relations between men and women. They are impacted, for example, by northern militarism, global capitalism, development projects which impact issues of water, land, and so on, as well as structural adjustment and neoliberalism, which erode public infrastructure and deepen women’s burdens. The northern feminist focus on relations between women and men and on putative cultural practices and traditions neglects colonial and postcolonial histories, structural inequalities, and North-South power relations. In the context of deepening global inequalities, which compel southern women to migrate to the Global North and into the homes of northern women as nannies and maids, or within which northern women will benefit from reproductive technologies tested on poor women in the south, such approaches point to how northern women may actually benefit from transnational processes that negatively impact southern women.23 Such gaps and silences are exemplified additionally when northern feminist groups and nongovernmental organizations ignore global capitalist, imperialist, and other North-South relations of power to focus on “problematic” cultures, customs, and practices.24 In much of this anti-racist work, while writers elaborate the variability and complexity of gender oppressions based on other structures of power, an assessment of the concept of gender itself is often only implicit. Several approaches, however, go further to make such an assessment explicit. One of the most searing indictments of the imperial and neo-imperial worlding of gender comes from an African perspective. For example, Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí argues that neither the concept of gender nor the concept of woman makes sense in an African context. Speaking specifically from the case of the Yoruba, Oyěwùmí argues: Women and patriarchy are taken for granted and are therefore left unanalyzed and unaccounted for. However, in mapping the Yoruba frame of reference, it became clear that the social category “woman”—anatomically identified and assumed to be a victim and socially disadvantaged—did not exist. Assuming the woman question a priori constitutes an unfounded application of the western model, privileging western ways of seeing and thereby erasing the Yoruba model of being.25 Oyěwùmí argues that European colonization practices and “the very process by which females were categorized and reduced to ‘women’”26 in these practices introduced gender asymmetries into Africa. Notably, this is a distinct critique from many of the others elaborated here. The argument is not that a hyper-focus on gender dynamics contributes to an elision of other dimensions of power. Rather, the contention is that the very assumption of the gender binary is a distortion at the level of ontology. A subsequent edited volume argues that in many African societies there are many social categories that do not rest on bodily distinctions of gender [or sex] … yet we cannot discount the growing presence of gender consciousness and the ongoing establishment of male superiority which has been unleashed by Africa’s encounter with Europe and the Arab world, and by the current gendered practices of institutions such as the World Bank, the United Nations, and various governmental and non-governmental organizations that promote the tenets of Western feminism in the rest of the world. In various guises and disguises, feminism continues to be the most avid manufacturer of gender consciousness and gender categories, inevitably at the expense of local categories …

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gender as essentialized ontology is one of these pseudo-universals deriving from Western culture that is being exported worldwide.27 In this work, Western feminism is understood to work alongside and with political, economic, cultural, and academic forms of imperialism. Thus the term “feminism” itself is often rejected. The dual argument that the gender binary is itself a distorting assumption, which does not comport with local realities, and that the gender binary is a colonial imposition, is also a point made in other contexts. For example, Paula Gunn Allen makes a similar argument regarding colonial and white, northern feminist mistranslations of indigenous cultural practices in the Americas. Focusing on how indigenous cosmologies and the specific role of women in them are worlded through a Western patriarchal lens, Allen traces the legacies of such epistemic violence for indigenous cultures.28 Finally, decolonial approaches build on such insights on gender itself as an imperial construct from Africa, the indigenous Americas, and elsewhere. Perhaps the most important statement here is offered by feminist philosopher Maria Lugones. Lugones writes about sex, gender, and sexuality together, also incorporating an important decolonial queer perspective. She writes that an integral dimension of colonial processes was the creation of a new gender system whereby colonialists created for—and imposed upon—the colonized very different arrangements compared to their white bourgeois colonizers. The gender binaries that mainstream feminists have critiqued were reserved exclusively for the latter, while racialized bodies were denied these normativities and their “protections.”29 For much of the colonial and independent history of the United States, for example, such differential gender arrangements led to the criminalization of the rape of white women as a violation of their womanhood, while black women could be raped with impunity. Under this dual gender framework, thus, only bourgeois white Europeans were gendered, and so civilized and fully human. Against this ideal, the enslaved and colonized were judged as excessively sexual and improperly gendered. Thus began “the long process of subjectification of the colonized toward adoption/ internalization of the men/women dichotomy as a normative construction of the social.”30 Ultimately, the “men versus women” heterosexualist patriarchy of mainstream feminist theorizing has been a deeply ahistorical framework of analysis, as heterosexual gender arrangements, capitalism, and racial classification are impossible to understand apart from each other.31 In this way, in addition to the insights from anti-racist approaches discussed above, Lugones’s work interrogates gender in its connection to a biopolitics of sexed bodies and sexuality.32

CONCLUSION The worlding of gender was preceded by what I call imperial prehistories—whereby racialized femininities and masculinities, as well as sexualities, became tools, modes of advancement, centerpieces, by-products, or side-effects of various racial-imperial projects. In the middle of the twentieth century, when northern, white feminists articulated gender as a concept, they elevated and foregrounded male-female relations from among these broader complexes of relations, thereby sidelining or invisibilizing other necessarily related dimensions of power. Since that time, anti-racist feminists across North and South have taken up racial-imperial productions, as well as northern, white feminist worldings of gender, in two central ways. First, anti-racist feminisms have pointed to the multiplicity of structures and relations of power

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that add to, modify, or complicate their experiences of gender. Within the Global North, such approaches have made the critical point that “beyond sisterhood there is still racism.” In addition, in the Global South, such approaches have pointed to the multiple forms of North-South power relations, which position women in the South in fundamentally different ways from women in the North, and which in fact position northern women to benefit from the exploitation of southern women. Other critical anti-racist approaches question the very concept of gender itself. Arguing that gender is either a colonial tool, colonial imposition, or colonial effect, African, decolonial, and other approaches problematize the very notion of gender, as well as of women. Finally, one other point is critical for the consideration of such contending worldings of gender. The anti-racist approaches outlined here have been elaborated about as long as northern, white feminist approaches have. And yet, central to consideration of these myriad, epistemological struggles around worldings of gender is the relationship between power and knowledge flows. As Mohanty pointed out in her essay back in 1984 concerning the production of knowledge about Third World women, “Western feminist writing on women in the third world must be considered in the context of the global hegemony of Western scholarship—i.e., the production, publication, distribution, and consumption of information and ideas.”33 In a paper on transnational flows of knowledge on sexual assault, a coauthor and I found that northern knowledges on the South can even displace southern knowledges themselves.34 Such dynamics of course also play out within the North itself. For example, the United States-based (but globally focused) campaign, Cite Black Women, was started in 2017 in order to push people to engage in a radical praxis of citation that acknowledges and honors Black women’s transnational intellectual production … As Black women, we are often overlooked, sidelined, and undervalued. Although we are intellectually prolific, we are rarely the ones that make up the canon. Recognizing this, Cite Black Women engages with social media, aesthetic representation (our t-shirts), and public dialogue to push people to critically rethink the politics of race, gender, and knowledge production.35 The Cite Black Women campaign as well as observations made by anti-racist approaches for decades now mean that we do not just have multiple and contending worldings of gender, but even more, and that they are differentially positioned within multiple relations of power. This means that we are more likely to encounter some of these worldings over others. This point is important to recognize not just for feminist approaches but also for other approaches that have taken up gender in recent years—queer approaches, disability studies, and so on. Gender is not an empty conceptual container. That is, gender is not a geographically, historically, and conceptually neutral concept. It has dense histories and spatialities which signify all kinds of power relationships that need to be acknowledged.

NOTES 1 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives,” History and Theory 24.3 (1985). 2 Ibid. 3 Maria Lugones, “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System,” Hypatia 22.1 (2007). 4 Vrushal Patil, “The Heterosexual Matrix as Imperial Effect,” Sociological Theory 36.1 (2018).

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5 Ibid., 13. 6 Antoinette M. Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). 7 David Haig, “The Rise of Gender and the Decline of Sex,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 33.2 (2004). 8 Vrushali Patil, Empire and the Social Construction of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality: From Societies to Webbed Connectivities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming). 9 Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978). 10 Ann Oakley, Sex, Gender and Society (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1972). 11 See for example, Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); Christine Delphy, “Rethinking Sex and Gender,” Women’s Studies International Forum 16.1 (1993). 12 Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley: Crossings Press, 1984/2007). 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid.; Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 1981); Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1983); Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands: La Frontera/the New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987). 15 Patricia Hill Collins, Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019). 16 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988). 17 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (New York: Routledge, 1995). 18 Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” boundary 2 12/13 (1984). 19 Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes, ” 337. 20 Chandra T. Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, eds., Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 21 The central texts here are M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, eds., Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures (New York: Routledge, 1997); Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, eds., Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). 22 See, for example, Paola Bacchetta et al., “Transnational Feminist Practices against War,” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 2.2 (2002); Vrushali Patil and Bandana Purkayastha, “Sexual Violence, Race and Media (in)Visibility: Intersectional Complexities in a Transnational Frame,” Societies 5.1 (2015); Vrushali Patil and Bandana Purkayastha, “The Transnational Assemblage of Indian Rape Culture,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 41.11 (2018); Julia Sudbury, Global Lockdown: Race, Gender, and the Prison Industrial Complex (New York: Routledge, 2005). 23 Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Hochschild, Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Global Economy (New York: Holt, 2004); Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997), 124–45. 24 Dorothy Hodgson, “‘These Are Not Our Priorities’: Maasai Women, Human Rights, and the Problem of Culture,” in Gender and Culture at the Limit of Rights, ed. Dorothy Hodgson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). 25 Perhaps the central text here is Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 79. 26 Ibid., 123–24. 27 Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónkẹ́, ed., African Women & Feminism (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2003), 2–3. 28 Paula Gunn Allen, “Kochinnenako in Academe: Three Approaches to Interpreting a Keres Indian Tale,” in The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions, ed. Paula Gunn Allen (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992).

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29 Lugones, “Heterosexualism.” 30 Maria Lugones, “Towards a Decolonial Feminism,” Hypatia 25.4 (2010): 742–8. 31 Lugones, “Heterosexualism,” 186–7. 32 For an assessment of Lugones’s work, see Vrushali Patil, “Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in Colonial Modernity: Towards a Sociology of Webbed Connectivities,” in Global Historical Sociology, ed. Julian Go and George Lawson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 33 Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes,” 336. 34 Patil and Purkayastha, “The Transnational Assemblage of Indian Rape Culture.” 35 Christen A. Smith, “Cite Black Women,” https://www.citeblackwomencollective.org/.

WORKS CITED Alexander, M. Jacqui, and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, eds. Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures. New York: Routledge, 1997. Allen, Paula Gunn. “Kochinnenako in Academe: Three Approaches to Interpreting a Keres Indian Tale.” In The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Ed. Paula Gunn Allen. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands: La Frontera/the New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987. Bacchetta, Paola, Tina Campt, Inderpal Grewal, Caren Kaplan, Minoo Moallem, and Jennifer Terry. “Transnational Feminist Practices against War.” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 2.2 (2002): 302–8. Burton, Antoinette M. Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Collins, Patricia Hill. Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. Daly, Mary. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. Boston: Beacon Press, 1978. Davis, Angela. Women Race and Class. New York: Vintage Books, 1983. Delphy, Christine. “Rethinking Sex and Gender.” Women’s Studies International Forum 16.1 (1993): 1–9. Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Arlie Hochschild. Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Global Economy. New York: Holt, 2004. Grewal, Inderpal, and Caren Kaplan, eds. Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Haig, David. “The Rise of Gender and the Decline of Sex.” Archives of Sexual Behavior 33.2 (2004): 87–96. Hodgson, Dorothy. “‘These Are Not Our Priorities’: Maasai Women, Human Rights, and the Problem of Culture.” In Gender and Culture at the Limit of Rights. Ed. Dorothy Hodgson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. 138–60. Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley: Crossings Press, 1984/2007. Lugones, Maria. “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System.” Hypatia 22.1 (2007): 186–209. Lugones, Maria. “Towards a Decolonial Feminism.” Hypatia 25.4 (2010): 742–59. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest. New York: Routledge, 1995. Millar, John. Observations Concerning the Distinction of Ranks in Society (1771). Dublin: T. Ewing, 1771. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008910227. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, eds. Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” boundary 2 12/13 (1984): 333–58. Moraga, Cherrie, and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 1981. Oakley, Ann. Sex, Gender and Society. London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1972.

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Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónkẹ́, ed. African Women & Feminism. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2003. Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónkẹ́. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Patil, Vrushali. Empire and the Social Construction of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality: From Societies to Webbed Connectivities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Forthcoming. Patil, Vrushal. “The Heterosexual Matrix as Imperial Effect.” Sociological Theory 36.1 (2018): 1–26. Patil, Vrushali. “Sex, Gender and Sexuality in Colonial Modernity: Towards a Sociology of Webbed Connectivities.” In Global Historical Sociology. Eds. Julian Go and George Lawson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 139–155. Patil, Vrushali, and Bandana Purkayastha. “Sexual Violence, Race and Media (in)Visibility: Intersectional Complexities in a Transnational Frame.” Societies 5.1 (2015): 598–617. Patil, Vrushali, and Bandana Purkayastha. “The Transnational Assemblage of Indian Rape Culture.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 41.11 (2018): 1952–70. Roberts, Dorothy. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. New York: Pantheon Books, 1997. Smith, Christen A. “Cite Black Women.” https://www.citeblackwomencollective.org/. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. 271–313. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives.” History and Theory 24.3 (1985): 247–72. Sudbury, Julia. Global Lockdown: Race, Gender, and the Prison Industrial Complex. New York: Routledge, 2005.

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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Worlding Queer SRI CRAVEN

INTRODUCTION The end of the 1990s was marked in US queer studies by a big debate on what queerness would look like theoretically and politically if the framework were widened to the global. This concern emerged out of scholarly ruminations on the psychoanalytical model of early queer theory as evacuating the material realm, on the globalization of US notions of queer via capitalist commodity culture, and on romanticized or relativistic anthropological accounts of non-Western sexuality that fail the project of critical theorizing.1 Early queer theory (circa the early 1990s), located in literary/cultural studies departments, and with psychoanalysis as its guiding interpretive framework, emphasized desire in the psychodrama of the individual and the family, with the discourse of religion and the state always close. Queer theory’s home in interdisciplinary gender and sexuality studies, where it became queer studies, stresses the crucial role of the political economies of colonialism and late twentieth-century developments in web, mobile, and biotechnologies for analyses of sexuality. This new way of studying sexuality occurs in the context of the “transnational turn” in academia in general that problematizes the Euro-American colonialist bias of intellectual traditions, which have shaped the narratives of sexuality’s cultural and political histories. In queer studies, the “transnational” grounds sexuality in the material and historical relations between the Global South and North. It draws in colonial ideologies of race, culture, and class that normalized and proliferated the female/male or homosexual/heterosexual binary and undid gender and sexual pluralities in the South, eventually, in a volte-face, producing queer subjectivity and politics in the North as the progressive contrast to the regressive and repressive South. Thus, the “transnational” situates sexuality as the site for constitutions and contestations of the idea of modernity itself. This chapter engages with “worlding” by providing a historical account of the theoretical and political issues raised by scholars across different global contexts, starting with the initiation of an/the academic field/area of study called “transnational sexuality/queer studies” in the United States. Such an approach concretizes and problematizes the “transnational” as it has been generated by/within gender and sexuality studies. Within gender and sexuality studies, the tendency is to synonymize “transnational” with the Global South in an exclusionary way that obscures the United States as the field’s home, the South as not equivalent to the location of “race,” and/or the non-South and non-North position of certain global states and cultures. As a broad descriptor, worlding in this chapter signals the effects of globalized political economies and cultural discourses upon/for sexuality. Such an optic also locates the production of queer and queer studies globally as inevitable under the conditions of transnational flows of capital and ideas, which make possible new social and political

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subject formations and modes of knowledge-making. Within the United States, these flows produce queerness through strategic/appropriative mobilizations of non-Western sexualities for both white and non-white subjects. They also enable investigations and critiques of racial formation through the “difference” of racially marked queerness. In the Global South, it also produces racially marked queerness as in the case of queers of color and diasporic queers, while simultaneously interrogating that difference by reading racial formation in the context of migration. In the Global South, these flows generate queerness through the demands made of cultures to respond to the AIDS pandemic and/or the newly available language of sexual subjectivity engendered by Western cultural and epistemological influences. Furthermore, the late-twentieth-century high capitalist economy makes available new resources in the South, as it did in previous decades in the North, including financial freedom from families, the decline in heterosexual marriage, and the possibilities of community making generated by media and technology.2 Thus, globally subjects and states deploy newly available discourses of identity, rights, and citizenship that are based on non-heterosexuality. This chapter frequently (re)turns to US queer studies as linked to the rise of queer cultures and scholarship elsewhere. This is not to suggest that without the United States, no place would be politicized by sexuality, but, rather, to note that queer cultures and scholarship as they exist today reveal distinct connections to United States in rhetorical styles, cultures, and political questions. It is also important to note that many of the critiques of dominant white US queer culture and theory emerge from within the United States. In a similar vein, critiques from the Global South attend to the political economies of academic studies of queerness (much like US Marxist queer scholars of the 1990s), either through self-reflexivity or critiques of “transnational”/Global South queer research enabled by Western locations and/or connections.3 However, queer studies cannot be dismissed as simply yet another market endeavor insofar as a critical look at sexuality reveals the workings of imperialistnationalist forms of state power (colonial, postcolonial, and non-colonized) across historical periods. The positive result of “worlding” queer, therefore, is that we are, today, better able to understand sexuality and gender as ideological systems and/or discourses—alongside other discourses of the body—that power systems and subjects of power use to shape “modernity” variably, and that this occurs within/through/under an evolving capitalist system that is the dominant economic model globally.4 A motivating force behind this historical approach is an interest in a pedagogy of “transnational (queer) sexualities” that addresses the sometimes convenient consolidations and sometimes disaggregations of “transnational queer,” “diasporic queer” (or queer diaspora), and “queer of color.” This chapter’s mapping of the “transnational” shows all those three terms as signaling attention to race within US queer studies. This is because “transnational queer” and “queer diaspora” are terms attributed to non-white and nonCaucasian im/migrants in the US context and are therefore ideologically/politically aligned with “queer of color.” While “queer of color” and “queer diaspora” bear many connections through racialization, it is important to note that the patterns and experiences of racialization differ based on the involuntary and voluntary nature of migrations. This chapter also works to revise and reshape the “transnational” as not reducible to the Global South, where it is studied as the site of “race.” Not only is race not an apt optic for studying any “difference” of queerness within Global South national and/or regional contexts (since the meaning of race is produced in relation to white Western queer studies frameworks), but it is important to acknowledge that the transnational begins and resides in the West given its beginnings within US queer studies.5 A key issue to consider here is that of the (non-white) transnational

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queer capitalist class, whose participation in the neoliberal global economy highlights the problem of situating “race” as predicting invisibility, marginalization, and/or oppression. In its historical (and perhaps socialist) reading, this chapter provides one possible framework to address the above pedagogical issues by reading queer studies and queer cultures and theories from racialized groups and the United States as part of the “transnational.”

EARLY DEVELOPMENT OF “TRANSNATIONAL QUEER STUDIES” The first forays into transnational frameworks for studying queerness occur in the context of studying globalization as an economic and cultural process that drives sexual discourses. The entry of globalization/global sexualities at conferences generated theorizations of the transnational. Research presented at these conferences often led to publications by university presses and leading journals, thus establishing a field tied to but extending queer studies. Invoking the “Queer Globalization” conference organized by the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York in April 1998, Elizabeth Povinelli and George Chauncey offer the first explanation of the transnational in their introduction to GLQ’s issue on transnational studies.6 In the essay, they use transnational/global interchangeably to refer to the need to study sexuality in the contexts of subjective mediations of external social forms that proliferate queerness globally. Povinelli and Chauncey’s hope that the issue represents an “opening rather than definitive statements on the ethnographic, historical, and theoretical accounts of contemporary global sexualities” certainly finds fulfillment in the two decades worth of studies that followed.7 The essays in that special issue collectively investigate new formations of subjectivity along the prolific and unstable signifier “queer” through global processes of diaspora, migration, liberalization, state regulation, and cultural production. These ideas have become the basis for much of the scholarship that defines the field today. Working from feminist and postcolonial critiques and cultural theory, Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan’s essay two years later prefers “transnational” to global, viewing the former term as better expressing the “specificities of sexuality in postmodernity” (where identity is always suspect) and “the asymmetries of globalization” (given the Western dominance of capital and military power).8 Grewal and Kaplan argue that by/in eliding questions of political economy, uneven economic and political relations, and universalizing theorizations (Western) queer studies methods limit critical understandings of sexuality as a mobile discourse.9 They offer the “transnational” as a corrective that allows for interdisciplinary readings of queer in the wider context of the cross-cultural travels and influences of sexual ideologies.10 Their particular concern is the simplistic theoretical production of queer subjects in the South as “agents of resistance” rather than as embedded in and emerging from material discourses of the body that are weighed in favor of the cultural, theoretical, and economic capital of the white West.11 A few years later, Carolyn Dinshaw, one GLQ’s two founding editors,12 uses the “transnational” to connect the convergence of Western for-profit capitalist publishing and radical intellectual/theoretical politics.13 Recalling GLQ’s outsourcing of typesetting to Malaysia, where some of the journal’s material was considered pornographic and thus subject to publishing controls, Dinshaw reflects upon the need to revisit the meaning of (Western) queer studies’ universalization of queer radicalism and politics in the face of “the complex global conditions of material production.”14 During this period, two other theorizations—one more famous than the other as a polemical and controversy-inducing argument—attend to the relationship between the

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commodification of US queer identity and the politicization of queerness through academic study and sexual rights activism. The Australian academic Dennis Altman was the first to argue that commodity-driven US gay culture with its consumer cultural focus on fashion, media, and magazines is proliferated globally to the detriment of local meanings of sexuality and sexual cultures.15 In a later essay, Altman draws on the ways sexual behaviors gradually converge globally through cross-cultural influences and new technologies.16 John Champagne’s argument that US commodity culture is the “prime carrier” of “a fictive gay sensibility” transnationally—including Europe—echoes Altman, although Champagne’s interest is the analysis of US queer scholars’ ethnocentric and narrow textual foci, which forgo materialist considerations.17 Champagne argues for examinations of US (white) queer academics’ place in global capitalism, including the tendency to obscurantist theory rather than more mainstream writing. He also challenges academic consumption of non-Western texts with imperialist anthropological optics, which reiterate old tropes of savagery, and the rescue of the Other.18 In all these theories, the “transnational” comes to the fore as a lens to examine white US queer-driven cultures and theories, identity politics and new forms of sexual subjectivity, and racialization and political economy. David Hall generates a similar critique by addressing the issue of just what the “transnational” signals when US queer theory is exported globally by academic scholars through/in their teaching and research.19

QUEER DIASPORA Transnational queer studies starts with Caribbean, Latin American, and Asian diaspora scholars from the mid-1990s in the United States under the influence of postcolonial and critical race theories. The scholarly concerns among diaspora scholars are the invisibility of queer diasporics in the racist imaginary of white Western cultures and the heteronormative tenor of cultural identity in diasporic cultures. These foci set the stage for cultural difference as racial difference, which leads to the idea that queer in diaspora cultures is queer of racial minority groups. This undoubtedly problematizes queer studies’ elision of race, but also causes it to somewhat limit “race” to US formations as noted earlier in the introduction to this chapter. Diasporic concerns begin with the publications of several anthologies by nonuniversity and university presses. Foregrounding queerness in diasporic communities, these works raise critical questions about the nature and goal of queer visibility in interrogating both racialization and cultural identity politics. Several anthologies establish the transnational turn in queer studies by drawing on cultural sites located outside the United States as they do on diaspora. Some of them, like Gay and Lesbian Themes in Latin American Writing (1991), ¿Entiendes? Queer Readings, Hispanic Writings (1995), and Hispanisms and Homosexualities, the volume that resulted from the eponymous conference at New York University in 1994, are academic analyses of cultural texts and discourses in specific Global South regions.20 Through the 1990s, others, such as A Lotus of Another Color: An Unfolding of the South Asian Gay and Lesbian Experience (1993) and Q&A: Queer in Asian America (1998), mimic those early Latin American ones. Notable are also women of color anthologies published since the 1980s that politicize lesbian sexuality in the context of the racialization of migrants.21 The latter category of volumes crosses the boundaries of academic and non-academic styles by including creative writing alongside scholarly ones, thereby challenging the elitist language of theory and academia as embodied by feminist studies of the era. These early diasporic anthologies

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thus introduce “race” as a formation produced by/through the transnational movement of people outside the paradigm of the slave trade. Increasingly, the “transnational” began appearing as a critical lens/tool to investigate queerness in racialized diaspora through the tropes of language, culture, and home introduced by early anthologies, which collected scholarly and non-scholarly writings. David L. Eng and Alice Y. Hom’s introduction to Q&A invokes the invisibility of Asian American queers to the white racist gaze that renders Asian American masculinity feminine and Asian American culture heterosexual.22 Sylvia Molloy and Robert McKee Irwin ask what the outing of queer Latin American culture implies both for the implicit heteronormativity attending the cultural identity politics of “hispanisms” (politicized since the switch to Latinx/Chicanx or latinidad from this early term) and for the racial exclusions by white queer culture.23 At the same time, these anthologies also address the instability of racial categorizations such as “Asian” and “hispanisms” as referents for varied geographical locations and cultures. Eng and Hom, for example, name “Asian” a sliding signifier for all Asian cultures located differently in historical relationship to the West and to one another.24 A few years earlier, Rakesh Ratti complicated this very notion in the idea of a “South Asian” queer anthology, arguing that “Asian” fails to capture the linguistic, racial, and cultural differences between East and Southeast Asians and South Asians.25 Malloy and Irwin, on the other hand, trouble the “expansionist bent” of hispanisms and hispanidad, which are not, in their argument, synonymous with “Hispanic studies” within which such colonialist inflection is interrogated.26 Studies of Latin America use “queer” as a destabilizing method to interrogate the coloniality of Latin American cultures through attention to race and class in queer identity constitution and cultural life.27 Additionally, whether by combining academic and non-academic styles, or through investigations of the many texts that are unknown outside their cultures of origin, these early works stay connected to the activist and social movements that foster queer lives amid homophobic ostracism, erasure, and other forms of violence in origin and domicile cultures. As diasporic queer studies developed and entrenched the phrase “queer diaspora,” there is a distinct turn toward theorizing queerness from the perspective of displacement and mobility, reading the queer diasporic position as that which exceeds the boundaries and ideologies of nation and heterosexuality.28 This positioning of queer diaspora, however, has been widely critiqued. Jasbir Puar calls for analyses of the very condition of mobility and of queer diaspora as enabled by privileges of class and language (English).29 Furthermore, Puar argues that celebrations of queer diaspora via the coming-out narrative implicit and explicit in queer anthologies also reassert, via queer visibility and identity politics, a modernity imagined as absent or unavailable in originary locations of diasporic cultures.30 Grewal and Kaplan argue that the emphasis on cultural identity over engaging the terms of mobility romanticizes the diasporic position.31 Meg Wesling critiques the inattention to the queer diasporic’s constitution through/by global capitalism and consumer culture by discourses of sexuality, gender, and nation.32 And, crucially, as Scott Morgensen argues, diasporic and immigrant queer theorizations need to interrogate rather than assume a position rather than assume a position of decoloniality associated with diaspora and queerness.33 Morgensen’s critique is especially apposite in light of queer diaspora’s participation in overwriting/replacing indigenous racial histories and calls for racial justice.34 The final line of critique is that queer diaspora has limited ability to describe uses of indigeneity, postcoloniality, and diaspora in contexts outside of the United States.35

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POSTCOLONIAL QUEER STUDIES Throughout the 1990s in the United States, postcolonial scholars of various stripes expanded feminist studies by investigating queer sexualities. In an important sense, both diasporic and postcolonial queer studies owe a debt to the critical contributions of non-white immigrant women from colonized locations, who, as part of the feminist movement in the 1980s and 1990s in the United States, theorize race as buttressing hetero-patriarchal capitalism.36 Motivated by feminist questions of racialized political economy and patriarchy, these early writings by immigrant feminists who identify as “women of color” can be said to provide the groundwork for two sites of inquiry within the descriptor “postcolonial queer studies.” This mode of inquiry pays attention to the post-colonies—decolonized nations/cultures—rather than colonial or settler colonial ones.37 The first major line of critique in this regard, inaugurated by Jacqui Alexander’s work, argues that postcolonial nationalist reconstruction is not just a masculinist project, but, crucially, a heterosexual reproductive one.38 In the context of Trinidad and Tobago, and the Bahamas, Alexander shows that postcolonial nation-states mimic the colonial patriarchal state in criminalizing non-procreative sex and returning women to unpaid or low paid work in the neoliberal economy.39 In this work, Alexander draws on feminist, feminist postcolonial, and postcolonial scholars who study various sites of nonreproductive sexuality—sex work, lesbian households, single women—as falling outside the purview of the state’s heterosexual family imperative and, therefore, its economic and legal protections. Alexander’s attention to postcolonial state regulation has generated further scholarship on other state and cultural nationalist practices that facilitate, proliferate, and secure homophobia, heterosexism, and heteronormativity by deploying strategically historical divides such as ethnicity, caste, religion, social class, and, of course, gender.40 For, as scholars note, state-sanctioned homophobia also changes in favor of queer acceptance in many states as the neoliberal economy advances. For example, several essays in Postcolonial Queer: Theoretical Intersections (2001), the first major collection that brings together postcolonial and queer theories, address the globalization of queer cultural forms and political ideas and liberalization as working together in uneven ways in postcolonial national contexts to engender new forms of sexual subjectivity.41 The second major site of study is the history and role of colonialism in reshaping gender and sexualities in colonized regions. Central to this line of inquiry are issues of sexual and gender pluralisms as the grounds on which constructions of racial difference proceed.42 Scholars locate and explain colonial ideas of racial difference as located in the non-heteronormative sexual and gender practices of the colonized, while colonial heterosexuality and the gender binary contributed to justifying racial hierarchy and, hence, colonial rule.43 Ironically, colonial homosexuality, ostracized at home, found a haven in the gender and sexual practices of colonized cultures even as colonial rule decimated queer sexualities in these cultures. Thus, the racialized power of queer desire in addition to colonial proscription remains a strong focus of postcolonial queer studies today.44

QUEER STUDIES IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH Despite the simplified idea common in pedagogical circles that “transnational queer” designates primarily prolific modes of understanding and living out sexuality and/or a resistance to sexual identity politics in non-Western cultures, the emergence of studies of

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sexualities through the 1990s shows significant connections to Western ideas of sexuality and sexual politics. Initial studies of/in the non-West were by Western scholars who, motivated by anthropological interests in “areas” and non-Western cultures, publicized non-Western gender plurality as evidence to contest the moralistic and disciplinary gender binary discourse of the Christian West. These studies romanticized or relativized non-Western queer sexualities to aid Western queer liberation projects and/or assert West/non-West difference, rather than use their studies to rethink disciplinary and theoretical assumptions and models.45 By the late 1990s, a distinct sexuality-based subjectivity and politics started emerging in various liberalizing South economies. The major processes that facilitated this emergence include: Western help in addressing the AIDS pandemic; Western capitalist markets that mobilized non-heterosexual forms of desire and identification; Western queer and queer diaspora scholarship that illuminated the fiction of heteronormativity; and the greater transnational mobility of people in the South that provided opportunities to engage new sexual ideas and ways of being. In the South, studies of sexuality under the new intellectual tradition of “transnational”—which draws on diaspora and postcolonial traditions from the West— produce several lines of analysis. First, they draw on historical traditions of gender and sexual plurality (which do not necessarily or always translate to egalitarianism or lack of power differentials) and on the new possibilities for sexual subject constitution generated by the transnational availabilities of commodity culture, the market in biotechnologies, as well as support from academic and welfare groups as innumerable studies of putative “third genders” show. This attention to third genders is inevitable in the context of the AIDS pandemic, which makes explicit gender and sexuality plurality as a fact of culture. In South and Central America, East and South Asia, and Africa, third gender traditions are important not only in the context of the challenges and complexities of AIDS programs but also in relation to reclamation projects associated with precoloniality and/or “tradition.”46 By drawing on the relatively lower economic and social status of gender nonconforming communities within nation-states or by interrogating the role of the neoliberal state and capitalist markets in positioning transgender subjects as icons of the state’s sexual liberalism, these studies emphasize that the critical attention to third genders does not, however, signal their liberation.47 In many South locations that are marked by histories of colonialism or other forms of Western political interference, studies that focus on female-female desire highlight the importance of considering local histories and cultural traditions alongside socioeconomic realities. For instance, female homoerotic desire is shown to exceed patriarchy in both preand postcolonial eras.48 At other times, such desire is presented as existing at the confluence of historical traditions of gender performance, patriarchy, and contemporary neoliberal economies instead of just sexual desire.49 Collectively, these studies suggest the importance of reading queerness in the context of historical change, rather than merely through the optic of current Western theories of desire and subject constitution that commodity culture and economic advancement render all too easy. Second, energized by postcolonial queer studies, current Western studies in the South reveal the postcolonial state’s complicated role in supporting and addressing homophobia. This area of study rose out of the immediate context of AIDS in the 1980s when activists across the South began addressing the state’s role in advancing homophobic rhetoric. Activists—and, later, scholars—showed postcolonial states’ public denials and disavowals of homosexuality alongside colonially inherited legal measures that criminalize homosexuality as impacting

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timely and appropriate responses to the pandemic.50 Western AIDS programs and Western scholarship that attempt to address postcolonial states’ responses constitute a related focus in this area. Notable in this regard is the work of the late activist scholar Shivananda Khan, who ran the first AIDS prevention programs in India. Khan shows that the imperative to identify by Western sexual identity categories prevents effective outreach because it does not reach those who view same-sex behavior as “play” or “release” rather than as implying gay/homosexual identity or group affiliation.51 In India, Ashley Tellis critiques the Western-centric nature of queer studies itself as a professional enterprise that serves the interests of academic scholars in the West rather than that of communities that face a broader range of gender-related and economic concerns beyond the pandemic alone.52 Third, given the general cultural terrain of homophobia and entrenched heteronormativity, it stands to reason that the equally—or perhaps more—challenging issue was politicization of non-heterosexuality revealed by the AIDS pandemic. Scholars turn to cultural representation and activism as major sites of queer visibility and politicization. Literature, film, and performance flourish through the 1980s and 1990s, offering scholars in later decades much material to visit and revisit. During this period, much of the global South saw publications similar to those by feminists who designate themselves “women of color” in the United States mentioned in the previous two sections. These publications provided a forum where creative, activist, and scholarly work could collectively challenge and re-do heteronormativity.53 I acknowledge with regret that linguistic unfamiliarity with Spanish and Portuguese precludes attention to the rich terrain of sexuality studies in Latin America during this period. That said, two English-language reviews offer insights into how creative and scholarly queer political discourses in postcolonial Latin America channel, benefit from, and participate in transnational discourses of sexuality.54 The same is certainly true of locations like India, South Africa, and most of East Asia, where new economic and cultural possibilities afforded by transnationalism are deployed to politicize and render visible gender and sexual plurality in/ through queer-themed publications and other cultural and social forms.55 Lesbian activists— so named or not—in particular have been at the forefront of supporting broader political agendas such as women’s choices regarding desire, marriage, family, and inheritance in nonheterosexual contexts.56 Such political work testifies to the impossibility of disengaging sexual desire from economic and more restrictively framed gender (as cis-women’s) issues in much of the South—a fact that queer scholarship will continue to have to account for in its reading of desire and subjectivity. Fourth, critiques of Western queer theoretical models form a key concern. Besides AIDS activists and scholars, the AsiaPacifiQueer (APQ) network critiqued the consequences for global studies of sexuality of queer theory’s US-centric bias. Based on their observations of the seminal “global” conference on queerness—the “Queer Matters” gathering held at King’s College, London, in May 2004—APQ’s founding members Peter Jackson, Fran Martin, and Mark McLelland: the English language hegemony instituted by US queer theory and publishing limits critical awareness of sexuality and sexual cultures outside Anglophone contexts; notions of cultural “difference” framed by/as/through US ethnic and racial categorizations and formations produce misreadings of sexuality’s history, practice, and politics in the South; and Western studies of non-Western queer sexualities in general is framed through area studies optics.57 Others add the following as problems to be addressed rather than ideas to be reiterated: the antagonistic and reductive position of the “local” as non-West and “global” as West (Huso Yi) and of “indigeneity” as always untainted by Westernization (Akiko Shimizu); the reiterations that “race … matters” without addressing it specifically in scholarly discussion

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(Helen Hok-Sze Leong); the purported radicalism of non-Western elites who fashion queer identity politics as an index of modernity and their coalition building with Western scholars and communities (Chris Berry); the ignoring of queer scholarship produced in non-Western cultures (Sharyn Graham).58 The APQ’s proposal to track regional commonalities and influences in studying sexualities to decenter the United States as the site and source of sexual cultures and epistemologies frames a significant section of South queer studies, especially in the Asia-Pacific region. APQ’s work and concerns led to the “Sexualities, Genders, and Rights in Asia: The First International Conference of Asian Queer Studies” in Bangkok, Thailand, in July 2005, which is widely regarded as producing an epistemic shift in queer studies.59 The conference contributed to unseating the reification of the “local”/Global South cultures as the repository of tradition or culturally authentic “fixed” sexualities and the “global”/US or Western queer culture as that of modernity and postmodern instability of sexuality.60 It introduced the concept of hybridity, which “underscores the way in which both Western and non-Western cultures of gender and sexuality have been, and continue to be, mutually transformed through their encounters with transnationally mobile forms of sexual knowledge.”61 But, rather than comparative studies with the West, the new agenda involves privileging intellectual relations among Asian countries, beginning with nation-bound studies that both “[reflect] the genuine unevenness of intellectual flows across the region” and “[demonstrate] the continuing power of linguisticcultural-discursive boundaries to limit the flow of ideas.”62 That the book was published by a US university press, however, suggests both Asia-based studies’ influence on US queer studies and that the two are linked through common intellectual agendas in the highly globalized and transnational space of academia in general. Since the mid-2000s, all four scholarly strands have achieved depth and nuance through attention to indigenous issues such as ethnic and civil conflict and forms of social organizing such as religion and gender, which shape the politicization of sexuality within national cultures. For instance, unlike the time of initial studies, states’ and cultures’ increasing deployment of queer rights and citizenship in the past decade to suggest their “global modernity” is the subject of scholarly scrutiny now.63 Thus, issues of queer investments in techno- and biocapitalism, the dangers of state-driven queer liberation, and the very activity of queer studies as diminishing the subversive power of quotidian of queer life are all new ways of addressing queerness as it manifests and thrives against danger across the South.64

CONCLUSION: RE-THINKING THE “TRANSNATIONAL” IN QUEER STUDIES The language of “development” (undoubtedly tied to colonialism) orders the world into Global North and South, which replaces the cruder “first” and “third” worlds used in the post-Cold War era up until the 1980s. Generally speaking, transnational sexuality studies’ focus is equated with the Global South, which this chapter has resisted through its invocations of the West and diaspora as defining aspects of transnationalism. And, most importantly, “transnational” should include the “Global East,” as Martin Müller has recently proposed to name the former “second” world or the socialist states that bore ties to the former USSR.65 Notable studies from this region include arguments about the complex dynamics of socialism that produces sexual liberalism as alternatives to bourgeois orthodoxy, while also regulating sex as a response to capitalist consumerist excess. Moreover, as scholars suggest,  Cold

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War research ideologies that position socialism’s responses to homosexuality as a sign of premodernity need scrutiny to present a historicized rather than geopolitically based picture of socialist cultures’ histories and attitudes toward queer sexualities.66 With all this in mind, it is worth thinking about two early questions related to “worlding” in the sense of ordering of nation-states by developmental categories. First, to what extent does the idea of the Global South work through and generate anew assumptions about economic and political histories without actually investigating them? Second, to what extent does the framework of the South as “postcolonial” limit understandings of sexuality in locations like Thailand, Afghanistan, Bhutan, and Nepal that were never colonized, and of cases like Saudi Arabia, which is not only not postcolonial, but is also not considered part of the Global South as other Middle Eastern countries are? This chapter does not develop in detail or with specificity the themes raised by its historical approach. But, in introducing them through foundational scholarship across multiple geographical sites, it calls for the resignification of “transnational” and “queer studies” and “transnational queer studies” everywhere, especially within the United States, and urges viewing all three terms in light of the presence of political economies and the market in racial, diasporic, and postcolonial identity politics, which queerness and queer scholarship also capitalize on. It foregrounds attention to multiple sites of disciplinary and interdisciplinary critiques as central to achieving a more historicized and less isolationist explanation of race in queer studies. This chapter follows the socialist queer critiques of the 1980s and 1990s in the United States that were prescient of the growth and spread of capital and the ways in which it reproduces and entrenches the old divides of knowledge production, class, and access among the marginalized. Queer and queer studies are, after all, located in a political economy where sexual subjectivity renders possible new forms of economic power in a global capitalist market that mobilizes diversity and expert forms of knowledge. In “worlding” queer, would it be possible to renew queer political commitments outside of not just desire and desiring bodies but also outside of corporate-style research and writing comprehensible only to an academic clique? This is an especially important question if we take into account the cultures being studied, where reading, writing, and, oftentimes, living are increasingly becoming impossible in the Anthropocene, let alone the neoliberal era.

NOTES 1 See John Champagne, “Transnational Queer: A Prolegomenon,” Socialist Review 27.1-2 (1999): 143–64; Dennis Altman, “On Global Queering,” Australian Humanities Review (1997), http:// australianhumanitiesreview.org/1996/07/01/on-global-queering/; Kath Weston, “Lesbian/Gay Studies in the House of Anthropology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 22 (1993): 339–67 for each of these positions. 2 See Barry D. Adam, “Globalization and the Mobilization of Gay and Lesbian Communities,” in Globalization and Social Movements, eds. Pierre Hamel, Henri Lustiger-Thaler, Jan Nederveen Pieterse, and Sasha Roseneil (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 166–79 for this argument. 3 See Ashley Tellis, “Disrupting the Dinner Table: Re-thinking the ‘Queer Movement’ in Contemporary India,” Jindal Global Law Review 4.1 (2003): 142–56. 4 This chapter deals with concepts such as nation, culture, and power from postcolonial and Marxist perspectives. 5 See Anjali Arondekar, “Geopolitics Alert!” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10.2 (2004): 237–39 for this critique.

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6 GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, published by Duke University Press is considered the founding journal of the field of “queer studies.” See Elizabeth A. Povinelli and George Chauncey, “Thinking Sexuality Transnationally: An Introduction,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 5.4 (1999): 439–49. 7 Povinelli and Chauncey, “Thinking Sexuality Transnationally,” 446. 8 Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, “Global Identities: Theorizing Transnational Studies of Sexuality,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 7.4 (2001): 664. 9 Grewal and Kaplan, “Global Identities,” 666–9. 10 Ibid., 672–5. 11 Ibid., 673. 12 The other is David Halperin, whom Dinshaw references in the essay. 13 Carolyn Dinshaw, “The History of GLQ, vol. 1: LGBTQ Studies, Censorship, and Other Transnational Problems,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12.1 (2006): 5–26. 14 Ibid., 5. 15 Dennis Altman, “On Global Queering,” Australian Humanities Review (1996), http:// australianhumanitiesreview.org/1996/07/01/on-global-queering/. 16 Dennis Altman, “Sex and Political Economy,” Australian Humanities Review (2001), http:// australianhumanitiesreview.org/2001/09/01/sex-and-political-economy/. 17 Champagne, “Transnational Queer,” 146. 18 Ibid., 159–60. 19 David Hall, “Can We Teach a Transnational Queer Studies?” Pedagogy 10.1 (2010): 69–78. Hall contends that the English-speaking Western-centric nature of queer publishing, research, and teaching practically ensures that US academics rarely read or engage scholarship produced in other cultures. See Hall, “Can We Teach a Transnational Queer Studies?” 71–6. 20 Paul Julian Smith, Emilie L. Bergmann, eds., ¿Entiendes? Queer Readings, Hispanic Writings (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); Sylvia Molloy and Robert McKee Iriwn, eds., Hispanisms and Homosexualities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). These followed memoir and fiction-based anthologies in prior decades, including Now the Volcano: An Anthology of Latin American Gay Literature (1979), and My Deep Dark Pain is Love: A Collection of Latin American Gay Fiction (1983), all of which through their evocations of diasporic identity provide important initial influences and possibilities for theorizing the new field of queer diaspora. 21 Rakesh Ratti, ed., A Lotus of Another Color: An Unfolding of the South Asian Gay and Lesbian Experience (Boston, MA: Alyson, 1993); David L. Eng and Alice Y. Hom, eds., Q&A: Queer in Asian America (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1998). For feminist influences, see “women of color” anthologies such as Cherie Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Toni Cade Bambara, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Radical Writings by Women of Color (Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 1981); Beverly Guy-Shefthall, ed., Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought (New York: The New Press, 1995). There are, of course, several others, and they are not mentioned here merely due to constraints of space. Any syllabus on women of color feminisms or a search for such anthologies will result in entries from Anglophone Western contexts where the category “women of color” signals the experiences of non-white immigrant, indigenous, and/or involuntary non-white migrants (such as African Americans). 22 Eng and Hom, “Introduction: Q&A, Notes on a Queer Asian America,” 1–2. 23 Molloy and Irwin, “Introduction,” ix–x. Several other works that precede Hispanisms and Homosexualities do similar kinds of work, and this work is being used only to illustrate the broader point of diasporic studies and queer studies. Any of the others could do the same theoretical work, with slight variations. 24 Eng and Hom, “Introduction: Q&A, Notes on a Queer Asian America,” 9, 13–14. 25 Rakesh Ratti, “Introduction,” 10–11. 26 Molloy and Irwin, “Introduction,” x.

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27 Jose Quiroga, Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America (New York: New York University Press, 2000) provides a nuanced analysis of class and race without naming them as such in the cultural analysis of social revolution and queer identity politics across major Latin American cities. 28 See Cindy Patton and Benigno Sanchez-Eppler, eds., Queer Diasporas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Arnaldo Cruz-Malave and Martin Manalansan, eds., Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism (New York: New York University Press, 2002); Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Popular Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 29 Jasbir Puar, “Transnational Sexualities: South Asian (Trans)nation(alism)s and Queer Diasporas,” in Q&A, eds. Eng and Hom, 406–9. 30 Ibid., 414. 31 Grewal and Kaplan, “Global Identities,”665. 32 Meg Wesling, “Why Queer Diaspora?” Feminist Review 90 (2008): 31–5. 33 Scott Morgensen, Spaces Between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 20. See also Paola Bacchetta, Fatima El-Tayeb, Jin Haritaworn, Jillian Hernandez, S. A. Smythe, Vanessa E. Thompson, and Tiffany WilloughbyHerard, “Queer of Color Space-Making in and Beyond the Academic Industrial Complex,” Critical Ethnic Studies 4.1 (2018): 45 for a critical conversation among a research group that talks about being European academics who come to North American institutions to escape the “unselfconscious whiteness” of European academy only to find themselves in settler colonial lands. The scholars involved argue that queer critique must involve varied ways of engaging mobility, race, racism, and liberation as a cluster of issues rather than discrete categories. 34 This is important to recognize in this historical moment when white and non-white immigrants alike effectively participate in the ongoing project of the white settler colonialism of North America through technological, scientific, and intellectual labor markets. 35 Bacchetta et al., “Queer of Color Space-Making,” 46–7 observe that in European contexts, indigenous is a shifting signifier that alludes either to white populations or is used as a racist term for postcolonial immigrants, unlike in North America, where it refers to the native peoples. 36 Notable works often cited and taught include Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1980) and Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power (Tucson: Kore Press, 1981); Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Trumansburg: The Crossing Press, 1982); Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg: The Crossing Press, 1984). Cherie Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, Bambara, ed., This Bridge Called My Back (1981); Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987); Gloria Anzaldúa, ed., Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1990); Cherie Moraga, Loving in the War Years: Lo que nunca pasó por sus labios (Boston: South End Press, 1983); Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1997). 37 The studies of the colonial laws against homosexuality and efforts to repeal them in several postcolonial nations are a good example. 38 Jacqui Alexander, “Not Just (Any)Body Can Become a Citizen: The Politics of Law, Sexuality, and Postcoloniality in Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas,” Feminist Review 48 (1994): 5–23. 39 Ibid., 7–22. 40 For example, the rhetoric of religious and xenophobic nationalism is used to further homophobia and vice versa, as we see in the case of right-wing Hindu rhetoric against Muslims in India. Rightwing Hindu women are coopted into homophobia through this type of nationalist rhetoric. 41 John Hawley, ed., Postcolonial, Queer: Theoretical Intersections (New York: State University of New York Press, 2001). 42 Ann Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995) is widely credited with inaugurating this line of inquiry, although the book does not reference homosexuality in particular nor colonial contexts beyond West and non-West (such as Japan, China).

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43 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (New York: Routledge, 1995), introduced this insight. 44 See Jarrod Hayes, Queer Nations: Marginal Sexualities in the Maghreb (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Hema Chari, “Colonial Fantasies and Postcolonial Identities: Elaboration of Postcolonial Masculinity and Homoerotic Desire,” in Postcolonial Queer, ed. Hawley, 227–304; Jasbir Puar, “Introduction: Queer Tourism, Geographies of Globalization,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 8.1-2 (2002): 1-6; Jacqui Alexander, “Imperial Desire/Sexual Utopias: White Gay Capital and Transnational Tourism,” in Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in Transnational Age, ed. Ella Shohat (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1998), 281–306. 45 See Kath Weston, “Lesbian-gay Studies in the House of Anthropology.” 46 This is the initial type of scholarship associated with third genders. For example, see Serena Nanda, Neither Man Nor Woman: The Hijras of India (Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing, 1990). 47 See Alok Gupta, “Englishpur ki kothi: Class Dynamics in the Queer Movement in India,” Because I Have a Voice: Queer Politics in India, eds. Arvind Narrain and Gautam Bhan (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2005), 122–42; Eng-Beng Lim, “Glocalqueering in New Asia: The Politics of Performing Gay in Singapore,” Theater Journal 57.3 (2005): 383–405 as examples of these lines of critiques. Also see Sean Patrick Larvie, “Queerness and the Specter of Brazilian National Ruin,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 5.4 (1999): 527–58. 48 See for the precolonial context of South Asia, Ruth Vanita, “Born of Two Vaginas: Love and Reproduction Between Co-Wives in Some Medieval Indian Texts,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 11.4 (2005): 547–77 and Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai, eds. Same-sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History (New York: Palgrave, 2000); and, for postcolonial South Asia, Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 49 See, for example, in African context, Ifi Amadiume, Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society (New York: Zed, 1987), and in the East Asian context, Megan Sinnott, Toms and Dees: Transgender Identity and Female Same-Sex Relationships in Thailand (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2004). 50 See AIDS Bhedbhav Virodhi Andolan (ABVA), Less Than Gay: A Citizens’ Report on the Status of Homosexuality in India (New Delhi: ABVA, 1991) for India. See Deborah Amory, “‘Homosexuality’ In Africa: Issues and Debates,” Issue: A Journal of Opinion 25.1 (1997): 5–10 for a review of the different positions on queer sexualities and identities as a political response to homophobia in different African postcolonial contexts. The study of colonially inherited laws and their impact are at the heart of extensive studies in almost all South cultures, and is too vast to cite. 51 See Shivananda Khan, “Men Who Have Sex eith Men in India,” in Gay and Lesbian Asia: Culture, Identity, Community, eds. Gerard Sullivan and Peter Jackson (New York: Harington Park Press, 2001), 99–117 and Lawrence Cohen, “The Kothi Wars: AIDS Cosmopolitanism and the Morality of Classification,” in Sex in Development: Science, Sexuality, and Morality in Global Perspective, eds. Stacey Leigh Pigg and Vincanne Adams (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 269–303. 52 See Ashley Tellis, “Ways of Becoming,” Seminar 524, Imagining Futures (2003): 35. 53 For an analysis of the critical importance of the anthology as a form, and of archives created by everyday writers in India, see Sridevi Nair, “‘A Record of Our Lives’: Anthologizing the Lesbian in India,” Amerasia 37.2 (2001): 57–71. Examples of influential anthologies include: from South Asia, Ashwini Sukthankar, ed., Facing the Mirror: Lesbian Writing from India (New Delhi: Penguin, 1999); Hoshang Merchant, ed., Yaarana: Gay Writing from India (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2000); Vanita and Kidwai, eds., Same-sex Love in India, 2000; Arvind Narrain and Gautam Bhan, eds., Because I Have a Voice: Queer Politics in India (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2005); Maya Sharma, ed. and transl., Loving Women: Being Lesbian In Underprivileged India (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2005); from Africa, Mark Gevisser and Edwin Cameron, eds. Defiant Desire: Gay and Lesbian Lives in South Africa (New York: Routledge, 1995); from the Caribbean a little later, Thomas Glave, ed., Our Caribbean A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2008).

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54 Ignacio López-Vicuña, “Approaches to Sexuality in Latin America: Recent Scholarship on Gay and Lesbian Studies,” Latin American Research Review 39.1 (2004): 238–53 and Jeffrey Zamostny, “Canon Formation and Diversity: Latin American Gay Literature in the Global Market,” Chasqui 40.2 (2011): 80–94 both offer useful review essays that include Spanish-language scholarly publications from the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. 55 See, for example, the essays in William Leap and Tom Boellstorff, eds., Speaking in Queer Tongues: Globalization and Gay Language (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004) for studies of the development of gay identity as a negotiation between indigenous histories and Western cultural influences. Throughout the South, copious numbers of literary works, feature and documentary films and artistic performances, and art that produce a critique of heterosexuality and hetero-gender ideology begin to flourish during this period as a result of transnationally available production mechanisms and consumer bases. 56 See Paola Bacchetta, “Rescaling Transnational ‘Queerdom’: Lesbian and ‘Lesbian’ IdentitaryPositionalities in Delhi in the 1980s,” Antipode (2002): 947–73 for discussions of this trend in India. See Nancy Saporta Sternbach, Marysa Navarro-Aranguren, Patricia Chuchryk, and Sonia E. Alvarez, “Feminisms in Latin America: From Bogotá to San Bernardo,” Signs 17.2 (1992): 393–434 for comparative Latin American contexts. 57 Peter Jackson, Fran Martin, and Mark McLelland, “Re-placing Queer Studies: Reflections on the Queer Matters Conference (King’s College, London, May 2004),” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 6:2, 300. In fact, they raise the issue that “one plenary speaker who, defending the US-based journal GLQ’s apparent lack of interest in publishing translations of non-English-language queer studies work, flatly asserted that the ‘default’ language of queer studies today is, in any case, English” (300). Despite GLQ’s and queer studies’ evolved position since those early years, especially as captured by Grewal and Kaplan’s comment that the journal publishes “new approaches” (672), the norm is that queer scholarship continues to be framed in/by the English language. The language issue is separate from the overall focus of this paper but relevant since the dominance of the English language facilitates the greater proliferation of Anglo-Western queer studies methods and theories. Grewal and Kaplan’s theorization of the transnational in sexuality studies includes a critique of the area studies model of queer studies, and, more than a decade after their and APQ’s critique, GLQ devoted a special issue, “Queer Studies, Area Studies,” where the editors and contributors generate various ways of challenging the area studies model of queer theory and studies—see GLQ 22.2 (2016). 58 Jackson, Martin, and McLelland, “Re-placing Queer Studies,” 301–11. 59 Among other contributions, the conference established the work of several scholars who cast light on Asian cultures such as Japan with thriving queer studies well before US queer theory. See Mark McLelland, Queer Japan from the Pacific War to the Internet Age (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). 60 Fran Martin, Peter Jackson, Mark McLelland, and Audrey Yue, “Introduction,” AsiaPacifiQueer: Rethinking Genders and Sexualities (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 5. 61 Ibid., 6. 62 Ibid., 9. 63 Arif Dirlik, “Global Modernity?: Modernity in an Age of Global Capitalism,” European Journal of Social Theory 6.3 (2003): 275–92. 64 This is the focus of the past decade of scholarship, and, hence, not within the purview of this chapter. See Oshir Sircar, “New Queer Politics in the New India: Notes on Failure and Stuckness in a Negative Moment,” Unbound 11.1 (2017): 1–36 for critiques of queer marriage agendas that entrench caste- and class-based nationalism in India. See Rahul Rao, “Global Homocapitalism,” Radical Philosophy 194 (November-December 2015): 38–49 for critiques of the deployment of queer rights by capitalist investors to secure profits and of queer subjects’ use of capitalism to secure rights. The postcolonial theorist Arif Dirlik defines global modernity as describing the power of cultural subjects to shape new ways of being modern by deploying global capital.

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65 Martin Müller, “In Search of the Global East: Thinking between North and South,” Geopolitics 25.3 (2020): 734–55. 66 See Dan Healy, “Homosexual Existence and Existing Socialism: New Light on the Repression of Male Homosexuality in Stalin’s Russia,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 8.3 (2002): 349–378 and Brian James Baer, “Russian Gays/Western Gaze: Mapping (Homo)Sexual Desire in Post-Soviet Russia,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 8.4 (2002): 499–521

WORKS CITED Adam, Barry D. “Globalization and the Mobilization of Gay and Lesbian Communities.” In Globalization and Social Movements. Eds. Pierre Hamel, Henri Lustiger-Thaler, Jan Nederveen Pieterse, and Sasha Roseneil. New York: Palgrave, 2001, 166–79. Amadiume, Ifi. Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society. New York: Zed, 1987. AIDS Bhedbhav Virodhi Andolan (ABVA). Less Than Gay: A Citizens’ Report on the Status of Homosexuality in India. New Delhi: ABVA, 1991. Alexander, Jacqui. “Imperial Desire/Sexual Utopias: White Gay Capital and Transnational Tourism.” In Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age. Ed. Ella Shohat. New York: The MIT Press, 1998. 281–306. Alexander, Jacqui. “Not Just (Any)Body Can Become a Citizen: The Politics of Law, Sexuality, and Postcoloniality in Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas.” Feminist Review 48 (1994): 5–23. Altman, Dennis. “On Global Queering,” Australian Humanities Review (1996). http:// australianhumanitiesreview.org/1996/07/01/on-global-queering/. Altman, Dennis. “Sex and Political Economy.” Australian Humanities Review (2001). http:// australianhumanitiesreview.org/2001/09/01/sex-and-political-economy/. Amory, Deborah. “‘Homosexuality’ In Africa: Issues and Debates.” Issue: A Journal of Opinion 25.1 (1997): 5–10. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987. Anzaldúa, Gloria, ed. Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1990. Arondekar, Anjali. “Geopolitics Alert!” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10.2 (2004): 236–40. Bacchetta, Paola. “Rescaling Transnational ‘Queerdom’: Lesbian and ‘Lesbian’ IdentitaryPositionalities in Delhi in the 1980s.” Antipode (2002): 947–73. Bacchetta, Paola, Fatima El-Tayeb, Jin Haritaworn, Jillian Hernandez, S. A. Smythe, Vanessa E. Thompson, and Tiffany Willoughby-Herard. “Queer of Color Space-Making in and beyond the Academic Industrial Complex.” Critical Ethnic Studies 4.1 (2018): 44–63. Chari, Hema. “Colonial Fantasies and Postcolonial Identities: Elaboration of Postcolonial Masculinity and Homoerotic Desire.” In Postcolonial, Queer: Theoretical Intersections. Ed. John Hawley. New York: State University of New York Press, 2001. 227–304. Champagne, John. “Transnational Queer: A Prolegomenon.” Socialist Review 27.1–2 (1999): 143–64. Cohen, Lawrence. “The Kothi Wars: AIDS Cosmopolitanism and the Morality of Classification.” In Sex in Development: Science, Sexuality, and Morality in Global Perspective. Eds. Stacey Leigh Pigg and Vincanne Adams. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005., 269–303. Cruz-Malave Arnaldo, and Martin Manalansan, eds. Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism. New York: New York University Press, 2002. Dinshaw, Carolyn. “The History of GLQ, Volume 1: LGBTQ Studies, Censorship, and Other Transnational Problems.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12.1 (2006): 5–26. Dirlik, Arif. “Global Modernity?: Modernity in an Age of Global Capitalism.” European Journal of Social Theory 6.3 (2003): 275–92. Eng, David L., and Alice Y. Hom, eds. Q&A: Queer in Asian America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998.

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Gevisser, Mark, and Edwin Cameron, eds. Defiant Desire: Gay and Lesbian Lives in South Africa. New York: Routledge, 1995. Glave, Thomas, ed., Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2008. Gopinath, Gayatri. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 22.2 (2016): 151–71. Grewal, Inderpal, and Caren Kaplan. “Global Identities: Theorizing Transnational Studies of Sexuality.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 7.4 (2001): 663–79. Gupta, Alok. “Englishpur ki kothi: Class Dynamics in the Queer Movement in India.” In Because I Have a Voice: Queer Politics in India. Eds. Arvind Narrain and Gautam Bhan. New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2005. 122–42. Guy-Shefthall, Beverly, ed. Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought. New York: The New Press, 1995. Hall, Donald E. “Can We Teach a Transnational Queer Studies?” Pedagogy 10.1 (2010): 69–78. Hawley, John, ed. Postcolonial, Queer: Theoretical Intersections. New York: State University of New York Press, 2001. Hayes, Jarrod. Queer Nations: Marginal Sexualities in the Maghreb. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Healy, Dan. “Homosexual Existence and Existing Socialism: New Light on the Repression of Male Homosexuality in Stalin’s Russia.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 8.3 (2002): 349–378. Jackson, Peter, Fran Martin, and Mark McLelland. “Re-placing Queer Studies: Reflections on the Queer Matters Conference (King’s College, London, May 2004).” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 6:2 (2004): 299–311. Karlinsky, Simon, and Erskine Lane, transl., and Winston Leyland, ed. Now the Volcano: An Anthology of Latin American Gay Literature. San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1979. Khan, Shivananda. “Men Who Have Sex with Men in India.” In Gay and Lesbian Asia: Culture, Identity, Community. Eds. Gerard Sullivan and Peter Jackson. New York: Harington Park Press, 2001. 99–117. Lacey, Edward A., trans., and Winston Leyland, ed. My Deep Dark Pain Is Love: A Collection of Latin American Gay Fiction. San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1983. Larvie, Sean Patrick. “Queerness and the Specter of Brazilian National Ruin.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 5.4 (1999). Leap, William, and Tom Boellstorff, eds. Speaking in Queer Tongues: Globalization and Gay Language. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Lim, Eng-Beng. “Glocalqueering in New Asia: The Politics of Performing Gay in Singapore.” Theater Journal 57.3 (2005): 383–405. López-Vicuña, Ignacio. “Approaches to Sexuality in Latin America: Recent Scholarship on Gay and Lesbian Studies.” Latin American Research Review 39.1 (2004): 238–53. Lorde, Audre. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1982. Martin, Fran, Peter A. Jackson, Mark McLelland, and Audrey Yue. “Introduction.” AsiaPacifiQueer: Rethinking Genders and Sexualities. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008. 1–27. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Context. New York: Routledge, 1995. Merchant, Hoshang, ed. Yaarana: Gay Writing from India. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2000. McLelland, Mark. Queer Japan from the Pacific War to the Internet Age. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. Molloy, Sylvia, and Robert McKee Iriwn, ed. Hispanisms and Homosexualities. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. Moraga, Cherie. Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1997. Moraga, Cherie, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Toni Cade Bambara, eds. This Bridge Called My Back: Radical Writings by Women of Color. Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 1981.

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Morgensen, Scott. Spaces Between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Müller, Martin. “In Search of the Global East: Thinking between North and South.” Geopolitics 25.3 (2020): 734–55. Narrain, Arvind, and Gautam Bhan, eds. Because I Have a Voice: Queer Politics in India. New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2005. Nair, Sridevi. “‘A Record of Our Lives’: Anthologizing the Lesbian in India,” Amerasia 37.2 (2001): 57–71. Nanda, Serena. Neither Man Nor Woman: The Hijras of India. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing, 1990. Patton, Cindy, and Benigno Sanchez-Eppler, eds. Queer Diasporas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. Povinelli, Elizabeth A., and George Chauncey. “Thinking Sexuality Transnationally: An Introduction.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 5.4 (1999): 439–49. Puar, Jasbir. “Introduction: Queer Tourism, Geographies of Globalization,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 8.1–2 (2002): 1–6. Puar, Jasbir. “Transnational Sexualities: South Asian (Trans)nation(alism)s and Queer Diasporas.” In Q&A: Queer in Asian America. Eds. David L. Eng and Alice Y. Hom. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998. 405–22. Quiroga, Jose. Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America. New York: New York University Press, 2000. Ratti, Rakesh, ed. A Lotus of Another Color: An Unfolding of the South Asian Gay and Lesbian Experience. Boston: Alyson, 1993. Sharma, Maya, ed. and transl. Loving Women: Being Lesbian in Underprivileged India. New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2005. Sircar, Oshir. “New Queer Politics in the New India: Notes on Failure and Stuckness in a Negative Moment.” Unbound 11.1 (2017): 1–36. Sinnott, Megan. Toms and Dees: Transgender Identity and Female Same-Sex Relationships in Thailand. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004. Smith, Paul Julian, and Emilie L. Bergmann, eds. ¿Entiendes? Queer Readings, Hispanic Writings. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Sternbach, Nancy Saporta, Marysa Navarro-Aranguren, Patricia Chuchryk, and Sonia E. Alvarez. “Feminisms in Latin America: From Bogotá to San Bernardo.” Signs 17.2 (1992): 393–434. Stoler, Ann. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Sukthankar, Ashwini, ed. Facing the Mirror: Lesbian Writing from India. New Delhi: Penguin, 1999. Tellis, Ashley. “Disrupting the Dinner Table: Re-thinking the ‘Queer Movement’ in Contemporary India.” Jindal Global Law Review 4.1 (2003): 142–56. Tellis, Ashley. “Ways of Becoming.” Seminar 524, Imagining Futures (2003): 32–36. Vanita, Ruth. “Born of Two Vaginas: Love and Reproduction between Co-Wives in Some Medieval Indian Texts.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 11.4 (2005): 547–77. Vanita, Ruth and Saleem Kidwai, ed. Same-sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History. New York: Palgrave, 2000. Wesling, Meg. “Why Queer Diaspora?” Feminist Review 90 (2008): 31–35. Weston, Kath. “Lesbian-gay Studies in the House of Anthropology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 22 (1993): 339–67. Zamostny, Jeffrey. “Canon Formation and Diversity: Latin American Gay Literature in the Global Market.” Chasqui 40.2 (2011): 80–94.

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CHAPTER NINETEEN

Worlding Identity ZAHI ZALLOUA

Decoloniality and Afro-Pessimism are two recent movements that have energized critical black and ethnic studies, adopting a starkly oppositional stance toward European modernity and its conceptualizations of the “Human.” From the vantage point of decoloniality, whiteness is aligned with modernity and humanity (the site of civilization), while non-whiteness is aligned with non-Europeans, the less than human (the site of savagery). Western modernity exerts its hegemonic control over non-Europeans by determining their identity or being through a process of racialization.1 The decolonial task is to destabilize this imputed identity by worlding identity itself, challenging the self-imposed authority of the West and reimagining modernity more expansively, more generously, as covering the whole planet. Toward that end, Walter D. Mignolo prefers the formulation “identity in politics” over “identity politics”2—which still holds a lot of currency within ethnic studies—since, unlike the latter, the former is always already denaturalized, lacking any intrinsic properties or force. “Identity in politics” acknowledges from the start that one’s identity has been constructed and allocated by European colonial powers. Rather than playing within the rules of modernity, decolonial theorists seek to fashion an identity free from the prison house of coloniality. Afro-Pessimists, for their part, are more reluctant to frame the problem as one between modernity and the non-Europeans. Indeed, they claim that black and ethnic studies have systematically misconstrued the enemy as white supremacy. Like decoloniality, AfroPessimism argues for a deeper engagement with the legacy of modernity. But it deviates from the decolonial agenda when it foregrounds the role of antiblackness in modernity’s definition of human subjectivity. For Afro-Pessimists, the human comes into being through the constitutive exclusion of blacks: to be Human means that I am not a slave (black). Antiblackness engenders a hierarchy of races, with whites at the top and blacks at the bottom. These competing attempts at worlding identity—an identity otherwise than Western— share an investment in (non)identity that carries with it the risk of fetishization, whether that investment takes the form of a decolonial retreat into a non-European world, or, conversely, an ontologization of blackness as a negation of the Human that condemns blacks to a paradoxical life of worldlessness. This chapter takes up the challenges of decoloniality and Afro-Pessimism, while exploring alternative ways of worlding the (non)identity of the NonEuropean—modernity’s marginalized and racialized others.

DECOLONIAL REBELLIONS We might characterize decoloniality as postcolonial theory’s offshoot or rebellious variant; its relation to Western modernity is far more combative than that of its forerunner. Unlike

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postcolonial theory, which relies heavily on continental philosophers (Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, etc.), decoloniality actively exposes “the dark side of modernity,” urging and enacting a more significant break with Western modernity, which it considers inseparable from the spread and legacy of colonialism.3 Indeed, the birth of Western modernity coincides with colonial domination—the conquest of the Americas. According to Aníbal Quijano, this conquest effectively “began the constitution of a new world order, culminating, five hundred years later, in a global power covering the whole planet.”4 As Mignolo asserts, “there is no modernity without coloniality.”5 Western modernity is thus not about the Enlightenment and its democratization. Modernity without racial difference, without its imperial agenda, is not just an incomplete definition: it is a complete distortion of its matrix and legacy. Against postcolonial theory’s all-too-narrow archive—which requires that it operate within a “modern/colonial epistemology,”6 thus becoming subservient to a Western ethos (even if, or rather because, it claims a postmodern lineage)—decoloniality hungers for (a return to) the local, a precolonial, authentic reality uncorrupted by European thought and the hegemony of global market democracy (neoliberalism).7 Mignolo and others counteract Europe’s “geopolitics of knowledge” with “epistemic disobedience” and a wholesale rejection of modernity’s putative universalism.8 For the decolonial theorists, the West’s “coloniality of power”9 and epistemic monopoly on the world must be resisted on every front. Modernity’s ideological distinction between the West and the rest of the world produced a model of imperial domination that has been—and continues to be—detrimental to the identity of most non-Europeans. For the past five centuries, the West has assumed and asserted its epistemic superiority, its authority (emanating from Christianity or Reason itself) to rule over nonEuropeans. Nelson Maldonado-Torres describes this as the “myth of modernity,” a myth “simultaneous with the emergence of modern subjectivity itself: freedom and the ensuing sense of rationality that emanates from it were tied to a peculiar conception of power that is premised on the alleged superiority of some subjects over others.”10 The “myth of modernity” authorizes the West to define identity, positioning it in the role of the definer while positioning the rest of the world, the non-Europeans, in the place of the defined.11 Western modernity’s knowledge production served first and foremost imperial powers: painting the non-European as infrahuman facilitated the racial-colonial project. But as Boaventura de Sousa Santos notes, “the understanding of the world by far exceeds the West’s understanding of the world. The Western understanding of the world is as important as it is partial.”12 For Hamid Dabashi, decoloniality begins with an affirmation that “the world we inhabit, planet Earth, has many imaginative geographies”;13 there is, in other words, nothing special about Europe. It is not the case that Europeans are “rich” in world, whereas the rest of the world are “poor” in comparison, to paraphrase and critically adapt Heidegger (for whom the distinction rich/poor serves to sustain the hierarchical difference between humans and animals). Decoloniality revolves around empowering native cultures and making indigenous knowledges visible, relevant, and comprehensible, counteracting what the West has constituted as false, insignificant, or contingent, falling outside what is considered legitimate knowledge. Decoloniality, then, is as much about un-learning as it is about relearning: undoing the colonization of the mind via a recovery, restoration, and appreciation of a formerly discredited indigenous wisdom and the ways of life that emerge from it. Western modernity—in its totalizing mode of apprehension—is thus guilty of practicing what José Medina calls “epistemic death,” silencing non-Europeans, denying their agency, and barring their involvement in any hermeneutical endeavor and official knowledge production.14 Needless to say, under coloniality (the afterlife of colonialism),15 modernity’s progress and

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its democratizing logic never really apply to non-Europeans, who were/are systematically excluded from the gains of modernization and globalization. The will to interpret/know is a privilege of the Western subject, which is not afforded to the oppressed and racialized nonEuropean (even post-independence). A critique of the West is of course hardly an unprecedented gesture. Eurocentrism has been in retreat for quite a while. Indeed, the work of decolonization is predicated on deprivileging Europe as the center for global values. Decoloniality’s goal of “epistemic reconstitution”16— reconstituting precolonial ways of thinking and knowing after having contested the colonial structures of knowledge and subject formation—critically prolongs this anti-Eurocentric tradition. And yet the term has been revived by Slovenian philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek in his polemical article, “A Leftist Plea for ‘Eurocentrism.’” Mignolo quotes and then glosses the opening sentence of Žižek’s essay: When one says Eurocentrism, every self-respecting postmodern leftist intellectual has as violent a reaction as Joseph Goebbels had to culture—to reach for a gun, hurling accusations of protofascist Eurocentrist cultural imperialism.17 A self-respecting decolonial intellectual will reach instead to Frantz Fanon: “Now, comrades, now is the time to decide to change sides. We must shake off the great mantle of night, which has enveloped us, and reach, for the light. The new day, which is dawning, must find us determined, enlightened and resolute. So, my brothers, how could we fail to understand that we have better things to do than follow that Europe’s footstep.”18 According to Mignolo, Fanon’s message is through and through a decolonial one: Europe belongs to the past, and even represents an obstacle to the previously colonized’s intellectual growth. There is no decolonizing of the mind, and of knowledge, without a clean and decisive break with Europe, with its hegemonic universalism and its exclusive claims to rationality. Mignolo frames Žižek’s comment as callously nostalgic for the good old days of Eurocentrism, when Europe’s investment in universalism (oblivious to the matrix of coloniality/modernity, to its devastating effects on non-Europeans) still mattered. But this is a gross mischaracterization. What Mignolo ignores here is Žižek’s crucial qualifier to Eurocentrism: “leftist” (I will return to Žižek’s musings on Eurocentrism and universality in the last section of this chapter). Still, Mignolo’s evocation of Fanon as marking a shift in the modality of resistance, in his decentering of the West (Europe’s history is not the world’s history) and refusal to follow the script of Modernity, does coincide with a larger paradigmatic shift in critical black and ethnic studies. What counts for the West as unprecedented events, such as the Shoah, must be provincialized. Departing from Giorgio Agamben’s narrative of biopolitics, MaldonadoTorres importantly recalls that “the colony—long before the concentration camp and the Nazi politics of extermination—served as the testing ground for the limits and possibilities of modernity.”19 Fanon himself had already made this point, challenging the Shoah’s unprecedentedness: “[Jews] have been hunted, exterminated, and cremated, but these are just minor episodes in the family history. The Jew is not liked as soon as he has been detected. But with me things take on a new face.”20 Racial slavery—what modernity systematically downplays or trivializes—made blacks ontologically subhuman, reduced to what Achille Mbembe calls an “image ontology.”21 In the vein of provincializing Western discourse and moving beyond “macronarratives from  the perspective of coloniality,”22 decolonial theorists substitute transmodernity for

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modernity. Whereas the old model takes a teleological and linear view of progress, starting with Greece moving to Rome, to the Renaissance, and to the modern world, transmodernity makes the colonial encounters constitutive of modernity, spatializing modernity by making it cover the entire planet. As Linda Martín Alcoff aptly puts it, “if modernity is imagined to be European, transmodernity is planetary, with principle players from all parts of the globe.”23 We might add, if modernity adopts Descartes’s “I think therefore I am” as inaugurating Europe’s modern ethos, transmodernity adopts Mignolo’s decolonial thesis, “I am where I think.” Descartes’s formulation asserts the unity between thinking and being, invites abstraction and promotes an imperial epistemology (we are all cogitos), while Mignolo’s underscores regions and territories, or “border thinking” (“the moments in which the imaginary of the modern world system cracks”24) and makes the question of geography central to any questions of knowledge and biography. To assert “colonial difference” is to argue for a kind of difference that resists its conventional explanation by appeals to nature or culture. To fully unpack the meaning of colonial difference is to put it “in relation to the very dynamics of imperial and colonial power, in short, in relation to the coloniality of power, knowledge, and being.”25 In the statement “I am where I think,” the word “where” pluralizes (=democratizes) meaning and the experiences of the world, affirming a planetary sensibility over a reified global vision, including raced identities, as defined and articulated by the West. The saying “I am where I think” is an act of worldmaking (worlding). It legitimizes subaltern voices and thus declines “the universality to which everyone has to submit,”26 reorienting our interpretive gaze back to history and locality, to non-Europeans’ positionality in relation to “the epistemic and ontological racism of imperial knowledge.”27 Decoloniality rejects the West as the exclusive criterion for what or who counts and does not count. And again, the reception of the Shoah points up the fault lines brought to light by the decolonial turn. What is at stake here is the West’s investment in the human as white, with the non-European racialized as subhuman. This decolonial sensibility and outrage is visible in Aimé Césaire’s pointed observation about Hitler’s crimes. In Discourse on Colonialism, Césaire presents a decolonial supplement to the subject of modernity, “the very distinguished, the very humanistic, the very Christian bourgeois”: What he cannot forgive Hitler for is not the crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.28 Colonialism and chattel slavery are evoked together to counterbalance the prevailing ethicopolitical weight of the Shoah in the European imaginary. Here Césaire affirms a virtual solidarity among the unrecognized and marginalized, the enslaved and colonized of Western modernity: the excluded (the indigenous, indentured laborers, and slaves), those racialized bodies deemed unworthy of being mourned. In this respect, the decolonial concept of transmodernity functions as a politico-hermeneutic corrective, helping to reconceptualize the framework of mourning—worlding mourning, if you will—by rendering visible and relevant the identity of non-Europeans, making it available for interpretive care. Afro-Pessimists, however, caution against this seemingly unproblematic call for cross-racial solidarity. The colonized and the slave are not the same. The category of the excluded fails to adequately differentiate between the positionality of the two.

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WORLDING AS DESTRUCTION In the words of Frank B. Wilderson III, one of Afro-Pessimism’s most vocal theorists, “the Afro-pessimists are theorists of black positionality who share Fanon’s insistence, that though Blacks are sentient, the structure of the entire world’s semantic field … is sutured by anti-black solidarity.”29 Today’s racism is not an unfortunate residue of prior days that only occasionally manifests itself in hate crimes and excessive police brutality. No, antiblackness is constitutive of white civil society. The very movement of blacks is a threat—requiring white surveillance and aggression if/when necessary. A black person is by definition a danger, standing for criminality, always already in violation of humanity’s normative ideals, the “antithesis of a Human subject … an anti-Human … against which Humanity establishes, maintains, and renews its coherence, its corporeal integrity.”30 From the standpoint of blacks, then, white supremacy is not the fundamental problem of contemporary society; rather, it is antiblackness, stemming from the modern ontology of the human: the human being as defined in its basic opposition to the slave (resulting in the alignment of nonbeing with blackness). Blacks not only served as “the burning fossil that fueled capitalism during its primitive era”31 but also helped to define the contours of bourgeois labor, bringing to light the ontological difference between the Human and the slave.32 The worker could sell his or her labor power as a commodity, whereas the slave’s being—accumulable and fungible—was used and exchanged as a commodity.33 Slaves could obviously labor but they did not have to. Slaveowners in New Orleans could inject their slaves (understood as property) with poisons for sadistic entertainment, for the sheer joy of watching them suffer and die.34 Aspiring to humanist goals—freedom, humanity, and equality—is not the way out of an antiblack world but a contribution to its cruel and perpetual reproduction (decolonial theorists make a similar point, but again they conceptualize the enemy of European modernity and its victims as the non-Europeans—which includes the enslaved and the colonized). If reform and progress are ideological lies, what then is left to do for Afro-Pessimism? Wilderson vigorously repeats Fanon reiteration of Aimé Césaire’s plea to his readers to bring about “the end of the world,” which is the “only thing … worth the effort of starting.”35 Only the destruction of the world as we know it can overcome antiblackness. This is in effect unadulterated pessimism. But still, what does it mean? Is this rhetorical flourish? Is it really meant to be taken literally, and what does the “world” to be destroyed consist of exactly? Is this a call for revolutionary violence? Yes and no. Afro-Pessimists displace political economy with libidinal economy, since the violence experienced by blacks is altogether of a different order. It is not that of the worker’s alienation from labor under capitalism—what a Marxist reading, with its emphasis on the struggle against exploitation, would be most attentive to. Rather, it reflects both the singularity of their past trauma (racial slavery) and their subjection to civil society’s libidinal economy, which the editors of Afro-Pessimism: An Introduction define as the economy, or distribution and arrangement, of desire and identification, of energies, concerns, points of attention, anxieties, pleasures, appetites, revulsions, and phobias—the whole structure of psychic and emotional life—that are unconscious and invisible but that have a visible effect on the world, including the money economy.36 An eye for the libidinal economy of civil society complements an account of antiblack violence focused on America’s criminal justice system and its state-sanctioned violence against black bodies. It speaks directly to society’s collective unconscious—what an anti-racist perspective

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always risks missing by abstracting too much, by seeing all minorities as victimized by white supremacy—to its “fantasies of murderous hatred and unlimited destruction, of sexual consumption and social availability that animate the realization of such violence.”37 This lifeworld fostered by white civil society is experienced as a deathworld by its black citizens. For Afro-Pessimism, the operative antagonism of civil society is not between white and its racialized others, but between black and non-black. A white civil society precludes the possibility of a world without antiblackness. Such a world requires overcoming this fundamental antagonism, and thus the destruction of white civil society, of a community of citizens tied by their shared antiblackness. Worlding identity, if such a thing is possible, involves the end of the world. To fully appreciate why this world, why civil society is irredeemable, is to take seriously, or even axiomatically, the transformative impact of the transatlantic slave trade on the ontology of blackness. The Middle Passage generated nothing short of a “new ontology”: racial blackness, an ontological paradox, a kind of (non)being devoid of any relationality.38 As Fanon before him, Wilderson argues that the ontological mutation of African lives surpassed that of the Shoah: “Jews went into Auschwitz and came out as Jews, Africans went into the ships and came out as Blacks. The former is a Human holocaust; the latter is a Human and a metaphysical holocaust.”39 A refrain in the works of Wilderson and other Afro-Pessimists is that black slavery is “without analog”:40 “That is why it makes little sense to attempt analogy: the Jews have the Dead (the Muselmann) among them; the Dead have the Blacks among them.”41 In the realm of “human” comparison, blacks are incomparable. Other racialized bodies—such as Jews, Palestinians, Native Americans, undocumented immigrants, refugees, queers, and so on—are all extended (some of) the privileges of humanity. There is in place a juridical framework, a mechanism—however flawed—available to the (non-black) excluded to voice their wrongs, to secure the protection of the law: In its critique of social movements, Afro-Pessimism argues that Blacks do not function as political subjects; instead, our flesh and energies are instrumentalized for postcolonial, immigrant, feminist, LGBT, and workers’ agendas. These so-called allies are never authorized by Black agendas predicated on Black ethical dilemmas. A Black radical agenda is terrifying to most people on the Left because it emanates from a condition of suffering for which there is no imaginable strategy for redress—no narrative of redemption.42 Blacks are denied access to the emotional rewards of redemption. But Palestinians, for example, are not without a just solution: putatively embodied in a Palestinian state, a return to a “prior plenitude,” to a “spatial place that was lost.”43 In stark contrast, the condition of diasporic blacks is characterized by what Orlando Patterson calls “social death.”44 If, in the case of the Palestinians, there is a “recognition of the spatial coordinates of that demand,” blacks are without any willing auditors capable of hearing their plight: “The collective unconscious [of the white auditors] is not ready to accept that blacks are human.”45 This lack of auditors is not contingent (you just need to find the right people to hear your plight) but necessary (antiblackness—in white civil society—has become fully naturalized; the inability to hear what blacks are saying is as natural as breathing air). To have genuine interlocutors would trouble their “integrity as a human,”46 inducing nothing short of a crisis in white identity. What makes racial chattel slavery without analog is the utter singularity of social death. As Jared Sexton points out, social death cannot be generalized: “it is indexed to slavery and it does not travel.”47

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For Wilderson, black subjectivity as such does not exist—whence his preference for writing  “‘Black’ (subjectivity under erasure),”48 denoting an ontologically compromised subjectivity, which is characterized by the absence of unity between self and being (this is a major difference from the decolonial theorists who are more interested in multiplying sites of agency rather than in negative subjectivity as its locus). Afro-Pessimism is at odds with the dominant understandings of the subject, of the world and its grammar. It is particularly suspicious of the subject of Marxism and postcolonial theory (to the extent that they both assume a Eurocentric framework of analysis) and their proposed revolutionary projects. Wilderson identifies—and simplifies a great deal in doing so—a tripartite structure in the emancipatory projects of Marxism and postcolonial theory: The arc of an emancipatory progression which ends in either equality, liberation, or redress, in other words, a narrative of liberation, is marked by the three generic moments that one finds in any narrative: a progression from equilibrium (the spatial-temporal point prior to oppression), disequilibrium (capitalist political economy or the arrival and residence taking of the settler), and equilibrium restored/reorganized/ or reimagined (the dictatorship of the proletariat or the settler’s removal from one’s land).49 For Marxism and postcolonialism, the world as such—the world of the Human where antiblackness reigns—is not in need of destruction. The world’s equilibrium, in principle, can be restored. In other words, the emancipated world that Marxists and postcolonial (and, I would add, decolonial) theorists envision is a world that they already know, a world ever marked by antiblackness: “Through their indisputably robust interventions, the world they seek to clarify and deconstruct is the world they ultimately mystify and renew.”50 But for Afro-Pessimism, the world is decisively beyond redemption.51 The “arc of an emancipatory progression” is another ideological lie. There is no nostalgic and redemptive return to Africa as in the Négritude movement. “Blackness cannot be disimbricated from slavery.”52 Accordingly, there was never an equilibrium, since black (non)being itself came into existence as a by-product of the Middle Passage. In white civil society, blacks exist only for possession and use. If Leftists typically rally against black oppression, they nevertheless relativize it. As they see it, there is a clear division between blacks as slaves and blacks post-slavery. Black oppression today belongs to a more generalized necropolitics, where some lives count and some do not.53 This move is resisted by Afro-Pessimists, since the call for a solidarity of the oppressed perpetuates a misrecognition of antiblackness. Rallying behind solidarity attests to a failure to hear what Afro-Pessimists are saying. Sexton, for example, faults Mbembe for diverting his analysis from slavery and its aftermath in “African-derived populations” to a “‘third worldist’ conception of the colonized warranting analytic comparison and political solidarity between the sub-Saharan African postcolony and the living legacy of colonialism in the Middle East.”54 Mbembe shares the decolonial perspective that colonial experimentation should not be considered a relic from the past. Coloniality, the legacy of European modernity, persists in contemporary politics, in Israel’s neocolonial occupation of Palestine, described by Mbembe, much to the chagrin of Afro-Pessimists, as “the most accomplished form of necropower.”55 In Palestine and elsewhere Mbembe exposes a sovereign logic emblematic of late modern colonial occupation; this logic works in “seizing, delimiting, and asserting control over a physical geographical area—of writing on the ground a new set of social and spatial relations.”56 In accordance with colonial sovereignty, the Israeli state “define[s] who matters and who does

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not, who is disposable and who is not.”57 Palestinians, who embody the global plight of the colonized, do not matter. For Sexton, this mode of argumentation “loses track of the singular commodification of human existence (not simply its labor power) under racial slavery, that structure of gratuitous violence in which a body is rendered as flesh to be accumulated and exchanged.”58 If “the lived experience of the black” has no analog, as Sexton asserts, then how can blacks share a common cause with the Palestinians? There is an unbridgeable gap between “contingent forms of suffering” (the lived experience of non-black non-Europeans) and “structural forms of suffering” (the lived experience of the black population).59 Up to this point, there seems to be no hermeneutic daylight between Sexton and Wilderson: whites and non-blacks of color misunderstand the range of antiblackness. The slogan “we’re all victimized under white supremacy” does not adequately speak to civil society’s integral antiblackness. Consequently, cross-racial coalitions are, at best, suspect (their will to analogize “render[s] equivalent slavery and other forms of oppression”60) and, at worst, complicit with whiteness in their latent antiblackness, and thus prone to go against the interests of blacks if/ when these no longer fit their goals. Sexton anticipates leftist resistance to Afro-Pessimism. Against the charge of playing “Oppression Olympics” (what he cleverly describes as the leftist version of “‘playing the race card”61) to the detriment of building a solidarity movement, Sexton returns the charge by accusing his accusers of displaying a “people-of-color-blindness.”62 And yet Sexton obliquely opens the door for a different approach to solidarity, for a solidarity grounded in “radical opposition.”63 Solidarity is possible if the “structural position of the black” is not taken as an “afterthought” but instead foregrounded in the anti-racist struggle: “the whole range of positions within the racial formation is most fully understood from this vantage point.”64 In explaining his point, Sexton distinguishes between “the vantage of black existence” and “the views of black people.”65 He continues: “the two will likely overlap, but they are not identical. A sensibility derived from attention to the structural position of the category of blackness is likely to be produced by people designated or self-identified as black, but it will neither be exclusive to nor inherent in their intellectual practice.”66 This is not meant to be “a totalizing gesture,” but is akin to the “slave” “embod[ying] what Slavoj Žižek would call the ‘universal particular’: not another particular group among others, but ‘a singularity of the social structure’ that ‘relate(s) to the totality,’ a point of identification with constitutive— not contingent—exclusion.”67 To do justice to the struggle against antiblackness, an anti-racist solidarity must adopt the “vantage of black existence” and engage “black existence [as] the truth of the racial formation.”68 Blacks stand, in another Žižekian register, for the “part of no-part,” which is “the symptomal point of universality: although it belongs to its field, it undermines its universal principle.”69 In the United States, for instance, blacks are formally citizens, but devalued by, and excluded from, white civil society. Although formally included in the “set” of American society, they do not have a legitimate or respected place within it. Unlike other racialized bodies, blacks live under constant suspicion, subjected to the physically and psychically devastating libidinal economy of white civil society.

WORLDING AS AN ANTI-CAPITALIST PROJECT Yet we cannot stop at juxtaposing the “contingent violence” of non-blacks with the “permanent violence” of blacks.70 As Sexton intimates, the lived experience of antiblackness is not in and

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of itself sufficient to elevate blacks into the position of the “universal particular” or the “part of no-part.” Blacks need to adopt the “vantage of black existence.” “Black,” as deployed by Afro-Pessimists like Sexton, can be read as the subjectivization of the “part of no-part”; the injustice done to blacks is staged as “the ultimate test of universality.”71 The question of universality of course brings us back to Mignolo’s decolonial objection to Žižek’s Eurocentrism. What this critique misses is the “leftist” qualifier: Žižek is calling for a leftist Eurocentrism. This “leftist” alters substantially the meaning of Eurocentrism. Žižek clearly means to unnerve his postmodern and liberal readers too comfortable with either jettisoning the pursuit of universality or settling for the comfort of ideological difference and rooted identity (the decolonial retreat to a precolonial authentic state is arguably the latest instantiation of this trend). There is no glorification of Europe as an imperial project.72 Žižek repeatedly recognizes and affirms the excluded as the non-Europeans par excellence. But here unlike his liberal counterparts, Žižek does not treat the excluded, the non-Europeans, as mere victims of European modernity and global neoliberalism. Revolutionary energy does not emanate exclusively from the West (the bastion of whiteness); indeed, Žižek singles out Palestinians as candidates for the “part of no-part.” In the United States, Žižek also considers the Black Lives Matter movement as an embodiment of the concrete universal. With its call for solidarity with other racialized groups (such as Palestinians and the Standing Rock Sioux), Black Lives Matter declines to follow the Afro-Pessimists in their separatist agenda. Žižek’s revival of the Left is also clearly at odds with Wilderson’s version, since there is no assumption of a return to equilibrium. For Wilderson, “the liberation of Black people is tantamount to moving into an epistemology that we cannot imagine. Once Blacks become incorporated and recognized I don’t think we have the language or the concepts to think of what that is. It’s not like moving from Capitalism to Communism, it’s like the end of the world … It’s like moving to Mars.”73 Wilderson here understands communism to be one totalizing system simply replacing another, reestablishing equilibrium in man and world. But for Žižek communism means something else completely. To be a communist is precisely not to subscribe to “the system which deservedly collapsed in 1990” but instead “to care for the commons—the commons of nature, of knowledge—which are threatened by the [capitalist] system.”74 The desire for communism and the desire for the end of the world are by no means mutually exclusive. communism, for Žižek, does not come with the comfort of a blueprint; as the impossible horizon of/within capitalism, communism is not so different than moving to Mars. Moreover, Žižek’s Marxism is fueled by negativity, by what Žižek calls, after Agamben, the “courage of hopelessness.” Žižek agrees with Afro-Pessimism that seeking an alternative to the status quo within the coordinates of the existing system is not evidence of critical inventiveness but “a sign of theoretical cowardice.”75 Žižek argues that “the true courage is to admit that the light at the end of the tunnel is probably the headlight of another train approaching.”76 Only after you realize that white civil society forecloses any attempt at genuine critique can genuine change take place.77 Again, destroying the world is predicated, for Žižek, on a critical engagement with society’s political economy (without in the least bracketing or diminishing the role of the libidinal economy). No transformation of the social coordinates can take place unless there is a confrontation with the dynamics of global capitalism—a recognition that “politics is not just politics—politics is in the economy.”78 Like Žižek, Mbembe puts global capitalism at the center of any discussion of race and worlding. Global capitalism is in the process of deworlding of the world; it is responsible for what Mbembe describes as the “Becoming Black of the world”79—where only the obscenely

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wealthy are immune from blackening, from neoliberalism’s “biopolitics of disposability,”80 that is, the intractable capitalist logic that confers luxury to the one percent and misery to the rest, exploits humans as instruments, depriving them of their dignity and rights while generating an endless supply of new slaves. Worlding identity here is an urgent response to this becoming black of the world. It is both an anti-capitalist project (a struggle against exploitation) and an ethico-political one (a struggle against domination). But unlike the decolonial and Afro-Pessimist versions of worlding identity, it does not succumb to an all-too-easy anti-Eurocentrism, manifested as a nostalgic desire for a return to authentic precolonial or indigenous realities (decoloniality). Nor does it adopt or seek out a separatist mode of being, marked by black worldlessness, an exclusive kind of politics that risks reifying the schism between black and non-black (Afro-Pessimism). Mbembe and Žižek implicitly frame the question of worlding identity as a resistance to global capitalism, to the virtual instrumentalization and racialization of all of us—Europeans and non-Europeans alike.

NOTES 1 Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 2 Walter D. Mignolo, “The Decolonial Option and the Meaning of Identity in Politics,” Anales Nueva Época 9.10 (2007): 43–72. 3 See Gurminder K. Bhambra, “Postcolonial and Decolonial Dialogues,” Postcolonial Studies 17 (2014): 115–21. 4 Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” Cultural Studies 21.2 (2007): 168–78, 168. 5 Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 3. 6 Ibid. 113. 7 Mignolo, “Geopolitics of Sensing and Knowing: On (De)coloniality, Border Thinking and Epistemic Disobedience,” Postcolonial Studies 14.3 (2011): 273–83. 8 See Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity. 9 See Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantla: Views from South 1/3 (2000): 533–80. 10 Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 213. 11 Denise Ferreira da Silva sketches a similar narrative, opposing the “transparent I” of the postEnlightenment to the “affectable I” of the “others of Europe” (that is, the colonized and the enslaved of the world). The “transparent I” reflects Europe’s long investment in self-determination (ever since the Stoics and Augustine, “self-determination would be added as the rational thing’s exclusive (moral) attribute” [da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race, 40]). However, self-determination only became a European privilege after the conquest of the Americas. This genocidal encounter brought the “transparent I” to full fruition, giving it a global dimension, as “the kind of mind that is able to know, emulate, and control powers of universal reason.” And, at the same time, this catastrophic encounter is also responsible for producing its European counterpart: the “affectable I”: “the one that emerged in other global regions, the kind of mind subjected to both the exterior determination of the ‘laws of nature’ and the superior force of European minds” (da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race, 117). 12 Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2014), viii. 13 Hamid Dabashi, Can Non-Europeans Think? (London: Zed Books, 2015), 9.

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14 José Medina, “Varieties of Hermeneutical Injustice,” in The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, eds. Ian James Kidd, José Medina and Gaile Pohlhaus (New York: Routledge, 2017), 49. 15 “Coloniality is different from colonialism. Colonialism denotes a political and economic relation in which the sovereignty of a nation or a people rests on the power of another nation, which makes such nation an empire. Coloniality, instead, refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations. Thus, coloniality survives colonialism. It is maintained alive in books, in the criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of peoples, in aspirations of self, and so many other aspects of our modern experience. In a way, as modern subjects we breath coloniality all the time and everyday” (Maldonado-Torres, “On the Coloniality of Being,” Cultural Studies 21.2–3 [2007]: 240–70, 243). 16 Mignolo, “Decoloniality and Phenomenology: The Geopolitics of Knowing and Epistemic/ Ontological Colonial Differences,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 32.3 (2018): 380. 17 Slavoj Žižek, “A Leftist Plea for ‘Eurocentrism,’” Critical Inquiry 24.4 (1998): 988. 18 Mignolo, “Yes, We Can: Non-European Thinkers and Philosophers” (February 19, 2013), http:// www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/02/20132672747320891.html. 19 Maldonado-Torres, Against War, 217. 20 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 95. 21 Achille Mbembe, “Raceless Futures in Critical Black Thought,” Archives of the Nonracial (June 30, 2014), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkqmAi1yEpo. 22 Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 22. 23 Linda Martín Alcoff, “Mignolo’s Epistemology of Coloniality,” CR: The New Centennial Review 7, 3 (2007): 84. 24 Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs, 23. 25 Maldonado-Torres, “Levinas’s Hegemonic Identity Politics, Radical Philosophy, and the Unfinished Project of Decolonization,” Levinas Studies 7 (2012): 63–94, 70. 26 Mignolo, “I Am Where I Think: Remapping the Order of Knowing,” in The Creolization of Theory, eds. Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 161. 27 Ibid., 174. 28 Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 36. 29 Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 58. 30 Ibid., 9, 11. 31 Mbembe, “Conversation: Achille Mbembe and David Theo Goldberg on Critique of Black Reason,” Theory, Culture, and Society (July 3, 2018), https://www.theoryculturesociety.org/conversationachille-mbembe-and-david-theo-goldberg-on-critique-of-black-reason/. 32 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 62. 33 “Slavery was the condition of possibility for defining the content of ‘free’ labour of the propertyless proletariat. To be ‘free’ and to be a worker was negatively defined in relation to the slave” (R. L. “Wanderings of the Slave: Black Life and Social Death,” Mute [June 5, 2013]), http://www. metamute.org/editorial/articles/wanderings-slave-black-life-and-social-death. 34 Wilderson, “Wallowing in the Contradictions, Part 2 with Percy Howard” (July 14, 2010), https:// percy3.wordpress.com/2010/07/14/frank-wilderson-wallowing-in-the-contradictions-part-2/. 35 Wilderson, Red, White & Black, 28. 36 Frank B. Wilderson III, Saidya Hartman, Steve Martinot, Jared Sexton, Hortense J. Spillers, “Editors’ Introduction,” in Afro-Pessimism: An Introduction, eds. Frank B. Wilderson III, Saidya Hartman, Steve Martinot, Jared Sexton, Hortense J. Spillers (Minneapolis: Racked & Dispatched, 2017),

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7n1. Mbembe describes slavery in similarly libidinal terms: “slavery is not only about capturing, selling and shipping human cargoes across the Atlantic. It is also about remodeling the structures of jouissance, reconfiguring the psychic world of the matter, unleashing new forms of voracity and greed” (Mbembe, “Conversation”). 37 Jared Sexton, “Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear Word,” Rhizomes 29 (2016), https://doi.org/10.20415/ rhiz/029.e02. 38 Wilderson, Red, White & Black, 18, 56. 39 Ibid., 38. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 Wilderson, “Afro-Pessimism and the End of Redemption,” Humanities Futures. Franklin Humanities Institute: Duke University [October 20, 2015], https://humanitiesfutures.org/papers/afro-pessimismend-redemption/. 43 Wilderson, “‘We’re Trying to Destroy the World’: Anti-Blackness and Police Violence after Ferguson Pages,” in Shifting Corporealities in Contemporary Performance Danger, Im/mobility and Politics, eds. Marina Gržinić and Aneta Stojnić (New York: Palgrave, 2018), 45–59, 58. 44 “Slavery … is a highly symbolized domain of human experience. While all aspects of the relationship are symbolized, there is an overwhelming concentration of the profound natal alienation of the slave. The reason for this is not hard to discern: it was the slave’s isolation, his strangeness that made him most valuable to the master, but it was his very strangeness that most threatened the community … On the cognitive and mythic level, one dominant theme emerges, which lends an unusually loaded meaning to the act of natal alienation: this is the social death of the slave” (Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982], 38). 45 Wilderson, “‘We’re Trying to Destroy the World,’” 58. 46 Ibid. 47 Sexton, “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism,” InTensions 5 (2011): 21. 48 Wilderson, Red, White & Black, xi. 49 Wilderson, “The Black Liberation Army,” 178. 50 Wilderson, Red, White & Black, 338. 51 Ibid., 28. 52 Wilderson, “The Black Liberation Army,” 203. 53 “The blind spots which critical theorists have when thinking relations of power through the figure of the Black, the Slave: the end of the chattel technologies of slavery is often transposed as the end of slavery itself; which, in turn, permits the facile drawing of political analogies between Blacks and workers, and between Blacks and postcolonial subjects” (Wilderson, “The Black Liberation Army and the Paradox of Political Engagement,” in Postcoloniality-DecolonialityBlack Critique: Joints and Fissures, eds. Sabine Broeck and Carsten Junker [Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2014], 177). 54 Sexton, “People-of-Color-Blindness: Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery,” Social Text 28.2 103 (2010): 37. 55 Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, 1 (2003): 27. 56 Ibid., 25–6. 57 Ibid., 27. 58 Sexton, “People-of-Color-Blindness,” 38. 59 Ibid., 44. 60 Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 293n9. 61 Sexton, “People-of-Color-Blindness,” 47. 62 Ibid., 48.

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63 Ibid. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid., 56n75. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid. A cross-racial coalition could, for example, take up mass incarceration as a fundamental problem and contest how black bodies are treated as socially and legally insignificant, “meant to be warehoused and die” (Wilderson, “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?” Social Identities 9.2 [2003]: 238). 69 Žižek, “Learn to Live without Masters,” Naked Punch (October 3, 2009), http://www.nakedpunch. com/articles/34. 70 Wilderson, Red, White & Black, 16, 14. 71 Žižek, “A Leftist Plea for ‘Eurocentrism,’” 989. I explore Žižek’s views on race in relation to AfroPessimism in greater depth in Chapter 5, “Afro-Pessimism: Traversing the Fantasy of the Human, or Rewriting the Grammar of Suffering,” of Žižek on Race: Toward an Anti-Racist Future (New York: Bloomsbury, 2020). 72 With respect to the refugee question in Europe, Žižek is against crudely applying European universality to the refugees as if universality were a civilizing measuring stick. Indeed, a European way of life, as Žižek defines it, is antithetical to apartheid logic and sovereign authority; it rejects rather than upholds global capitalism’s divide between Us and Them. For Žižek, it is not the refugees but the anti-immigrant Europeans that pose the greatest threat to Europe: “A Europe where Marine Le Pen [in France] or Geert Wilders [in the Netherlands] are in power is no longer Europe. So what is this Europe worth fighting for?” (Žižek, Like A Thief in Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of PostHumanity [New York: Allen Lane, 2018], 98). 73 Wilderson, “Wallowing in the Contradictions.” 74 Žižek, “Actual Politics,” Theory & Event 14, 4 (2011). 75 Žižek, The Courage of Hopelessness: Chronicles of a Year of Acting Dangerously (New York: Allen Lane, 2017), xi. 76 Ibid., xi–xii. 77 Žižek’s brand of ideology critique is also very much attuned to the libidinal economy of white civil society. He insists that ideology operates most frequently at the level of the unconscious, soliciting and securing our libidinal investment: “the fundamental level of ideology … is not of an illusion masking the real state of things but that of an (unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality itself” (Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology [New York: Verso, 1991], 33). Negrophobic fantasies teach society’s privileged citizens to see the world as always already racially classified, nurturing implicit bias—locking individuals (would-be racists) into their unconscious patterns of judgment and behavior, encouraging and ensuring, in short, toxic relationality with racialized others. And, as Wilderson importantly stresses, this negrophobic fantasy is “supported and coordinated with all the guns in the world” (Wilderson, “Wallowing in the Contradictions”). On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown’s killing made visible the police not as “the agent of law, of the legal order, but as just another violent social agent” (Žižek, “Divine Violence in Ferguson,” The Philosophical Salon [March 9, 2015], https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/divine-violence-in-ferguson/). The tragic event shattered the social order’s veneer of justice, disclosing its failure to curtail, if not outright encourage, acting on society’s negrophobic fantasies. 78 Derbyshire, “Interview with Slavoj Zizek,” New Statesman, October 29, 2009, https://www. newstatesman.com/ideas/2009/10/today-interview-capitalism. 79 Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, trans. Laurent Dubois (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 6. 80 Henry A. Giroux, Stormy Weather: Katrina and the Politics of Disposability (Boulder , CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2006).

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WORKS CITED Alcoff, Linda Martín. “Mignolo’s Epistemology of Coloniality.” CR: The New Centennial Review 7.3 (2007): 79–101. Bhambra, Gurminder K. “Postcolonial and Decolonial Dialogues.” Postcolonial Studies 17 (2014): 115–21. Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. Trans. Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000. da Silva, Denise Ferreira. Toward a Global Idea of Race. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Dabashi, Hamid. Can Non-Europeans Think? London: Zed Books, 2015. Derbyshire, Jonathan. “Interview with Slavoj Žižek.” New Statesman, October 29, 2009. https://www. newstatesman.com/ideas/2009/10/today-interview-capitalism. de Sousa Santos, Boaventura Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide. Boulder , CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2014. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2008. Hartman, Saidya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Giroux, Henry A. Stormy Weather: Katrina and the Politics of Disposability. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2006. Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. “Levinas’s Hegemonic Identity Politics, Radical Philosophy, and the Unfinished Project of Decolonization.” Levinas Studies 7 (2012): 63–94. Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. “On the Coloniality of Being.” Cultural Studies 21.2-3 (2007): 240–70. Mbembe, Achille. “Conversation: Achille Mbembe and David Theo Goldberg on Critique of Black Reason.” Theory, Culture, and Society (July 3, 2018). https://www.theoryculturesociety.org/ conversation-achille-mbembe-and-david-theo-goldberg-on-critique-of-black-reason/. Mbembe, Achille. Critique of Black Reason. Trans. Laurent Dubois. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Trans. Libby Meintjes. Public Culture 15.1 (2003): 11–40. Medina, José. “Varieties of Hermeneutical Injustice.” In The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice. Ed. Ian James Kidd, José Medina and Gaile Pohlhaus. New York: Routledge, 2017. 41–52. Mignolo, Walter D. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Mignolo, Walter D. “The Decolonial Option and the Meaning of Identity in Politics.” Anales Nueva Época 9.10 (2007): 43–72. Mignolo, Walter D. “Decoloniality and Phenomenology: The Geopolitics of Knowing and Epistemic/ Ontological Colonial Differences.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 32.3 (2018): 360–87. Mignolo, Walter D. “Geopolitics of Sensing and Knowing: on (De)coloniality, Border Thinking, and Epistemic Disobedience.” Postcolonial Studies 14.3 (2011): 273–83. Mignolo, Walter D. “I Am Where I Think: Remapping the Order of Knowing.” In The Creolization of Theory. Eds. Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shi. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. 159–92. Mignolo, Walter D. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Mignolo, Walter D. “Yes, We Can: Non-European Thinkers and Philosophers.” Aljazeera, February 19, 2013. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/02/20132672747320891.html. Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. Quijano, Aníbal. “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality.” Cultural Studies 21.2 (2007): 168–78. Quijano, Aníbal. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla: Views from South 1/3 (2000): 533–80. R. L. “Wanderings of the Slave: Black Life and Social Death.”, June 5, 2013. http://www.metamute. org/editorial/articles/wanderings-slave-black-life-and-social-death.

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Sexton, Jared. “Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear Word.” Rhizomes 29 (2016). https://doi.org/10.20415/ rhiz/029.e02. Sexton, Jared. Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Sexton, Jared. “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism.” InTensions 5 (2011): 1–47. Sexton, Jared. “People-of-Color-Blindness: Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery.” Social Text 28.2 103 (2010): 31–56. Wilderson, Frank B. III. “Afro-Pessimism and the End of Redemption.” Humanities Futures. Franklin Humanities Institute: Duke University (October 20, 2015). https://humanitiesfutures.org/papers/ afro-pessimism-end-redemption/. Wilderson, Frank B. III. “The Black Liberation Army and the Paradox of Political Engagement.” In Postcoloniality-Decoloniality-Black Critique: Joints and Fissures. Eds. Sabine Broeck and Carsten Junker. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2014. 175–210. Wilderson, Frank B. III. “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?” Social Identities 9.2 (2003): 225–40. Wilderson, Frank B. III. Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Wilderson, Frank B. III. “‘We’re Trying to Destroy the World’: Anti-Blackness and Police Violence After Ferguson Pages.” In Shifting Corporealities in Contemporary Performance Danger, Im/ mobility and Politics. Eds. Marina Gržinić and Aneta Stojnić. New York: Palgrave, 2018, 45–59. Wilderson, Frank B. III. “Wallowing in the Contradictions, Part 2 with Percy Howard” (July 14, 2010). https://percy3.wordpress.com/2010/07/14/frank-wilderson-wallowing-in-the-contradictionspart-2/. Wilderson, Frank B. III, Saidya Hartman, Steve Martinot, Jared Sexton, Hortense J. Spillers, “Editors’ Introduction.” In Afro-Pessimism: An Introduction. Eds. Frank B. Wilderson III, Saidya Hartman, Steve Martinot, Jared Sexton, Hortense J. Spillers. Minneapolis: Racked & Dispatched, 2017. Zalloua, Zahi. “Afro-Pessimism: Traversing the Fantasy of the Human, or Rewriting the Grammar of Suffering.” In Žižek on Race: Toward an Anti-Racist Future. New York: Bloomsbury, 2020, 125–43. Žižek, Slavoj. “Actual Politics.” Theory & Event 14. 4 (2011). Žižek, Slavoj. The Courage of Hopelessness: Chronicles of a Year of Acting Dangerously. New York: Allen Lane, 2017. Žižek, Slavoj. “Divine Violence in Ferguson.” The Philosophical Salon, March 9, 2015. https:// thephilosophicalsalon.com/divine-violence-in-ferguson/. Žižek, Slavoj. “Learn to Live Without Masters.” Naked Punch, October 3, 2009. http://www. nakedpunch.com/articles/34. Žižek, Slavoj. “A Leftist Plea for ‘Eurocentrism.’” Critical Inquiry 24.4 (1998): 988–1009. Žižek, Slavoj. Like a Thief in Broad Daylight. New York: Allen Lane, 2018. Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. New York: Verso, 1991.

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The Professions

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CHAPTER TWENTY

Worlding Higher Education MICHAEL THOMAS

INTRODUCTION Over the last three decades, higher education has become increasingly international in orientation, driven by the search for new customers and new markets.1 While it has become commonplace in this environment for higher education (HE) consultants to talk about this period in terms of VUCA or an age of “Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity,” the values defining the “corporate” or “neoliberal” university appear to have been highly successful at reproducing themselves, often in the face of a now substantive and sustained academic critique.2 The corporate university’s ability to extend its reach has been particularly evident in the UK higher education sector where universities from the Russell Group to post92 institutions have established satellite campuses across Asia and the Middle East to boost their local and global brand presence. A significant proportion of their income now derives from international students’ tuition fees, and UK universities regularly draw on the prestige afforded by world rankings to advertise their courses and promote the quality of their brand in a sector that is worth around £5 billion to the national economy each year. While becoming “world-class” is a clearly stated aspiration of UK universities, the term incorporates several tensions. On the one hand, becoming “world-class” is identified with preparing students for their role in the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the global digital economy. On the other hand, focusing primarily on cognitive skills risks marginalizing the importance of others that promote international skills such as multiculturalism or foreign languages. To address global challenges that now matter to everyone in an increasingly interdependent and interconnected world, the use of non-cognitive skills and competencies appears to be equally important.3 According to Jane Knight, “internationalization” has attempted to incorporate both of these tensions, and this is evident in her influential definition of the term as “the process of integrating an international, intercultural or global dimension into the purpose, functions or delivery of post-secondary education.”4 A further definition offered by Hans de Wit, Fiona Hunter, Laura Howard, and Eva Egron-Polak suggests that internationalization aims to “enhance the quality of education and research for all students and staff, and to make a meaningful contribution to society.”5 While Knight’s definition mentions interculturalism and de Wit’s emphasizes the contribution to society, these aspects have been routinely marginalized as economics has become the true measure of internationalization’s return on investment. Indeed, the term has become synonymous with an opportunity for generating foreign income in a landscape distinguished by increased levels of competition, brand management, international talent recruitment, and strategic positioning.6 The internationalization of UK and other educational systems around the world has been enabled and driven by advances in digital technologies. Underpinned by powerful discourses

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associating digital education with “innovation,” “enterprise,” and “entrepreneurialism,” its primary role has been the preparation of students as workers. Digital educational technologies have likewise been central to neoliberal discourse in the field of pedagogy, though it is clear that they have often derived from technologies that were designed with business rather than education in mind;7 learning analytics is the latest in a long line of high-profile examples of this phenomenon to gain traction in the sphere of education.8 The expansion in student recruitment associated with internationalization has been couched in terms of an inclusive, widening participation agenda that aims to substantially increase the number of students involved in higher education, particularly in relation to the highly selective elite institutions, thus aiming to empower them by providing more consumer choice.9 More recently this sometimes overly evangelical discourse has been received with more skepticism, as digital technologies have been associated with the dark underside of tech company activities related to misinformation, user profiling, enhanced surveillance, and the mis-selling of private and confidential data.10 Research has also called into question the link between higher education, meritocracy, and social mobility, given the significant amounts of personal debt accrued by students and the nongraduate-level jobs many students actually obtain when they complete their course.11 The technologies that connect us also peddle online hate, cyberbullying, and fraud, and where Western technologies have been produced or used in the Global South and Asia, they have led to questions about the legacy of colonialism, digital waste, the exploitation of labor involved in technology supply chains, the use of conflict minerals, ethics dumping, and top-down rather than co-participatory research methodologies.12 The initial hype surrounding the emergence of massive open online courses (MOOCs) in 2012 was yet another example of an international innovation that aimed to transform the educational landscape. While it was positioned as a widening participation innovation, research now indicates that these platforms tend to attract already privileged demographic groups rather than enabling the expansion of knowledge and cultural capital to educationally disenfranchised or marginalized students.13 MOOCs may have amounted to an attempt to disrupt education under the guise of open access and inclusivity, while others suggest that they were a proxy for the financial reorganization of education that is increasingly sought by private educational technology companies.14 The international expansion of education, and in particular of online education, also requires greater understanding of the types of academic labor which support it. Research suggests that internationalization has led to increased levels of casualization as a result of the normalization of short- and/or fixed-term contracts that often do not include benefits, making many staff the academic equivalent of Uber taxi drivers who provide a flexible source of dispensable workers.15 As much as the Covid-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020 has led to the swift adoption of remote teaching and learning in universities worldwide, overcoming decades of apparent resistance or skepticism in a short period of time to online learning, it has also amplifyied the deeply rooted socioeconomic, racial, and gender inequalities that shape educational opportunities in the UK and around the world. In addressing this complex socioeconomic context, this chapter examines the ways the Covid-19 pandemic provides an opportunity to reflect on the internationalization of higher education over the last thirty years of neoliberal digital education reforms and to consider if this moment represents an opportunity for a progressive change of direction or the likelihood of more continuity with pre-pandemic economic and educational norms. While we constantly hear the need for a “recovery” to pre-pandemic levels of “normalcy,” does this risk returning to

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forms of growth-led globalization and internationalization that created or at least contributed to the cause of the pandemic in the first place? While internationalization and the search for “world-class” education has opened up systems around the globe for dialogue, it has been guilty of doing so for primarily economic reasons based on a growth model of development, and often at the expense of sustainable social and environmental justice.16 In this vein, the chapter examines an alternative, non-essentializing vision of the worlding of higher education in place of internationalization, based on global citizenship, which views higher education as a community-driven process of critical partnership between knowledge and the world, in which it is positioned as a public good shaped by critical pedagogy, values-based learning, and social justice.17 Worlding is here understood as a type of “sustainable citizenship that joins learning to living in right reciprocal relationships to the worlds of others (and things).”18

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON NEOLIBERALISM IN HIGHER EDUCATION The emergence and consolidation of what has variously been called the “neoliberal” or “corporate university” have been replicated around the world in powerful ways, driven by massification, internationalization, and employability.19 While the academic literature on neoliberalism has proliferated, the term has also become increasingly hazy and difficult to define. For some, it is too broad and has lost all specificity; for others, it precisely captures the characteristics of early-twenty-first-century global capitalism, the culture of conspicuous consumption, and its promise of unfettered global growth and development. While research on neoliberalism suggests that it is a problematical term, often because it risks aggregating many complex variables and becoming an “unproductive smudge”20 that is “complex, messy, and not easily defined,”21 following Daniel B. Saunders and Gerardo B. Ramirez I will use it here to recognize that its “varying definitions … reflect the broad reach of capitalism within our world, the uneven development of capitalist projects, and the meaningfully different and changing material contexts” in which it operates.22 Neoliberalism often presents itself as a reaction against a monolithic state and “culture of experts.”23 David Harvey describes it as “a theory of political economic practice that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterised by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.”24 It subjects everything to the natural order of the market and views collective action as misguided and as a restraint on the potential of the individual. In fact, there are many ways in which neoliberalism is statist in outlook, as while it may appear liberal at the top of the socioeconomic hierarchy, it often manifests as punitive for individuals at the bottom, whose sole objective becomes how to adapt to the culture of competitive market forces. Although the origins of neoliberalism are typically associated with an economic critique that became prominent in the late 1970s, the term can be traced back to the end of the 1930s as a response to the collectivism identified with communism and Nazism. Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom25 and The Constitution of Liberty26 were key texts that developed ideas related to unfettered free markets and the assumption that a large state approach to economic intervention will always be inefficient. These ideas gained traction during the late 1970s and manifested themselves in the Thatcher-Reagan governments in the United States and UK throughout the 1980s and in China and the former Eastern Europe in the 1990s and early decades of the New Millennium. Rejecting both the ideas of a large state or a state that does not interfere, as in the case of classic Liberalism, neoliberalism sought

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to regulate markets to make them function fairly, pitched against the wider background of encouraging competition and consumer choice. While for the Left only the state can enable social justice, the Right wish to move responsibility from governments to individuals. The move to introduce academies and free schools in the UK and to limit the role of the state are further examples of this trend in educational policy. In higher education, successive reforms in the UK have positioned students as consumers who pay tuition fees to purchase products which are ranked in national and international league tables.27 To stimulate this market, tuition fees have been substantially increased and maintenance grants for poorer students gradually withdrawn. This concentrated the minds of academics, students, and parents to view higher education as a direct route to training and employment and to require a tangible return on their investment. The market for students was further enforced through the removal of the cap on numbers each university could admit each year, a policy that further introduced new levels of competition between elite, mid-, and lower-ranking universities, thus enabling higher-status institutions to attract more students with lower grades. These changes to the market have produced falling enrolments for universities at the bottom of the rankings, and as a result, greater casualization of academic staff on temporary contracts has been put in place to meet fluctuating demand.28 Research suggests that a culture of lowering entrance grades and rising internal grade inflation has been an inevitable result of these changes at the same time as increasing levels of bureaucratization related to quality assurance have been introduced.29 Courses have become more professional in terms of their skills orientation, and there has been a greater emphasis on credentialization, which in turn causes students to reevaluate the worth of non-STEM and non-vocational related degree programs, especially those in the Arts and Humanities.30 This has come at a cost for academics too, as it has reinforced a culture of audit, measurement, performance management, customer feedback and increased the burden of administration for individual teaching and research staff.31 Increased performance management has led to increases in the incidence of mental health problems such as anxiety by both staff and students.32 The arguments outlined above are not new. In fact, they are all too familiar as the critique of neoliberalism in higher education has led to a significant body of academic work spanning several decades. While the arguments have been well rehearsed at length in academia and the popular educational press, neoliberalism’s grip on higher education in the UK appears to have strengthened rather than diminished. These increased levels of academic production demonstrate how the neoliberal economy has been equally adept at assimilating oppositional academic critique, pushed by the logic of “publish or perish” and the need for academics to “chase publications” and boost their “H-Index” to remain competitive in the world jobs market.33 Knowing about the most pernicious elements of neoliberalism is one thing; doing something effective outside of the academic mode of production of lectures and publications, it appears, is something quite different, and strategies to translate ideology critique into socioeconomic and political structures to challenge inequalities have proved more easily said than done.34 The neoliberal re-engineering of universities has led to a focus on the production of “useful” knowledge aligned with the importance of employability as a measure of an educational institution’s success and effectiveness in teaching and research. The national framework for evaluating teaching, a counterpart to the REF or Research Excellence Framework, which audits research outputs, research environment, and impact, has led to the similarly entitled Teaching Excellence Framework or TEF. Within this framework, teaching excellence is

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determined by the percentage of graduates securing employment six months after graduating, and no observation of actual teaching is included in the process.35 In this context, knowledge is no longer sought after for its own sake but exists to be consumed and valued due to its significance in the global marketplace. This vision replaces the notion of the university as a public good, in which institutions are created to contribute to and sustain a democratic public sphere characterized by free speech and criticality.36 In its place, an audit culture risks transforming universities into factories that provide workers, and academics are positioned as facilitators of knowledge, defined as useful to the performance of the economy, and whose value is evidenced through customer satisfaction surveys that students complete annually.37 Increasing market pressures on universities means that they have to compete with similar institutions and the audits are used to provide customers with indicators to inform their choice of products. The discourse of higher education has changed accordingly, substituting “universities” with “providers,” “courses” with “products,” and “teachers” with “facilitators” of knowledge. With it has come a culture of new managerialism and in recent years the increasing use of big data and analytics to benchmark and measure its effectiveness. Repositioned as feeder institutions for the digital economy, universities need to demonstrate their entrepreneurial spirit in terms of how many start-up businesses their graduates can develop. In this endeavor, they have become institutions transferring pragmatic knowledge and skills development, typified by the newfound dominance of business schools. This totalizing instrumentalism risks losing the sense of wisdom and wonder that also accompanies the development of knowledge. While universities have opened themselves to the world stage, driven by the rhetoric of world-class universities and rankings, they have lost the wonder that the internationalization of universities might have brought them. The diminution of the Arts and Humanities within a model of knowledge based on immediate use-value has been a consequence, as has the newfound totalizing obsession with data and quantitative forms of measurement, and far from universities benefiting from the internationalization of education, this lack of wonder and the search for wisdom may in turn impoverish the race for innovation and excellence. In engaging in internationalization and forsaking singular ideas of universities rooted in their native traditions and communities, they have gained a new sense of precarity in the global market and lost the sense of wonder that belonged to an earlier stage in their historical development. The emergence of students as customers within a massified system has consolidated their position as depersonalized spaces overseeing business transactions. Indeed, consumerist relationships have had a potentially negative impact on how students deal with innovative, difficult, or risky forms of pedagogy, which may not fall within expected parameters. This is likely to be even more relevant at low-status and financially poorer institutions such as the post-92 universities, where students’ financial investment is the same, but the outcomes may lead to less cultural and economic capital. Likewise, around the world we have seen the incorporation of universities, endless restructuring and mergers with employment providers, and the emergence of vocational and career-focused universities. An ever expanding higher-education market has also coincided with a change in the economic model of funding. Whereas the public sector universities were associated with common purpose and public good, private forms of higher education tend to emphasize the financial outcomes of the process to justify increased student tuition and capital investment in infrastructure and new buildings under the umbrella of “the student experience.”

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The turn toward the innovation and impact agenda in UK universities has been allied to the need to solve “real-world” problems through the use of “real-world” research. It is not the case, however, that all such problems can be solved by relying purely on a technical and cognitive skills-based approach. Addressing such complex and difficult problems requires academics to be more than mere service providers and students to be more than mere information consumers. As a service provider, academics may quickly lose value and respect from their students as their relationships are shaped by a utilitarian orientation. The growth in the market for privatized tuition has likewise reinforced the return on investment model in which teachers are focused on maintaining rates of student satisfaction by passing examinations, and thus their goal is not public service, but merely financial need.38 In internationalizing the university, we may in fact be erasing local and community traditions in favor of a global discourse that undermines students’ ability to appreciate ethics, history, and aesthetics. This instrumental approach alone cannot readily solve difficult and complex global problems but instead reinforces the intractable complexity that we will continue to experience as ineffable or unfathomable.

DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES AND NEOLIBERALISM Digital technologies have played a key role in the emergence of techno-capitalism, which is underpinned by the search for “continuous improvement” and “excellence” and provides a primary role to economists and management entrepreneurs. Though digital technologies have been positioned to provide university academics with the feeling of increased control, they also provide management with real-time data analytics that aim to quantify the student experience without paying attention to contextual factors that influence learning. From a marketing perspective, they entice students with the latest gadgets, and from a rankings perspective, they provide examples of an institution’s investment in resources for students.39 In this context, an academic’s disciplinary objectives are replaced by the need to demonstrate allegiance to an institution’s mission and strategic objectives. While digital technologies have been variously positioned as a response to the digital generation of students, as marketing devices, or as integral to the digital skills required by students to get a job, the last decade has also seen the steady emergence of more criticism and skepticism of this discourse.40 Surveillance techniques evident in the use of large technology companies such as Facebook and Google have underpinned this wave of criticism, as it is recognized that user information and data may be disseminated to other private commercial ventures to aid profiling.41 Increasingly digital skills curricula refer not only to how to use technologies for good but how to prevent them being used for misinformation and include more emphasis on the responsibilities universities have to teach students about the sometimes unexpected and intended ways in which data are collected and used. While the digital agenda is often aligned with empowerment, it is equally clear that empowerment must also mean adopting a critical and skeptical approach to how digital technologies are increasingly being used in education and society. Learning to use digital technologies then also means thinking about the ethics of use in an age in which data are being sold, often without students knowing about it, and areas such as artificial intelligence and the role technology in climate change are becoming increasingly important. In the pedagogical sphere, digital technologies are underpinned by a logic of technical determinism. While they are sold under the banner of “innovative” practice, they are in fact

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quite conservative in the educational space, as indicated by virtual learning environments, which have not significantly developed since they were first introduced. The use of digital technologies in education dates back to the use of home computers to replace mainframes in the 1980s, gradually becoming an indicator of social capital and social change, as technology became increasingly important in industry through the use of automation, analytics, and robotics. Higher education became an important source of training and employees for the labor market as the new digital economy required a new skilled labor force in engineering, digital technologies and computer science. New managerialist discourse has sought to rationalize and create demand for this approach through the identification of a so-called “digital generation” of students who need to be taught in new ways and who require new literacies.42 The growth and allure of Silicon Valley start-ups and designer lifestyle products have made technologies popular as much for their cultural and symbolical capital as for their use-value in education. Sitting behind apparently “neutral” systems such as virtual learning environments and anti-plagiarism software is often the impulse to collect large amounts of student data, but these systems have rarely been designed from the teacher or student perspective. Digital technologies are not neutral; they are political, and the daily work of academics and students has been changed by digital practices in fundamental ways that now require careful consideration and critique.

EDUCATION FOR GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP IN AN AGE OF DISRUPTION A growing amount of research over the last decade has focused on global citizenship as an alternative to the neoliberal forms of education described above, in which students and academics are positioned as consumers.43 This movement has gained support from UNESCO which identified global citizenship education as a strategic focus of its flagship education program and an important integral element of the UN General Secretary’s 2012 Global Education First Initiative. As we have seen, neoliberal policy documents in the field of education increasingly refer to a competency, training, and employability agenda, but there is also evidence of how this has been broadened out to include a wider skillset. Definitions of global citizenship have been strongly connected with “cosmopolitanism,” given that the Greek translation of the latter means “world citizen,” but both terms have been contested, and it is evident that both have political dimensions. According to William C. Smith et al., global citizenship is a “moral and political commitment to the values and responsibilities held within the global village and thus global citizens respond to global issues and tragedies accordingly through political communities.”44 Similarly, Smith et al.’s study identified a central role for education in promoting the values of global citizenship: “individual education and global citizenship suggest that individuals who have completed greater levels of education … are more likely to identify themselves as global citizens relative to their less educated peers.”45 Indeed, in place of the sole emphasis on economic integration which can lead to higher levels of nationalism, they argue that “education is the key to overcoming the fear of the Cultural Other, increasing global mindedness, and identifying as a global citizen.”46 Irene Davy calls global citizenship more of an approach to learning than a bolt-on “addition to the curriculum,”47 which consists of three key elements, including knowledge and understanding of global issues, critical thinking skills, and an understanding of pluralism.

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Critical thinking is central to the tradition of critical pedagogy as it encourages international mindedness in which the teacher is positioned more as a difficultator rather than a facilitator of “easily” consumed knowledge, as her role is to problematize accepted knowledge rather than merely to reproduce it.48 According to Colin Wright, critical pedagogy of this type is characterized by four key aspects.49 It is experiential in that it involves the critical process of questioning received information and self-questioning of normalized assumptions. This questioning process is transformative in that it aims to reconfigure inherited value systems. And critical pedagogy emphasizes new approaches to learning based on the acknowledgment of shared perspectives. As a rejection of the narrow instrumental logic, global citizenship education has been allied with civic engagement practices, aspects of social responsibility, social justice, care for the environment, inclusivity and equity in education, and sustainability, as well as a pivot toward values-based approaches involving wisdom, respect, tolerance, and responsibility.50 Through the internationalization agenda, programs promoting the mobility of students have been used as a proxy for citizenship education, but they have not often been aligned with ethical responsibilities.51 Rather than represent only one side of this discussion—corporate cosmopolitanism or social responsibility—is it possible to embed notions of global citizenship that combine the best of both? The questions cut to the heart of how universities position themselves in the global era, how they combine the traditional notion of the public good with the idea of ethically minded citizens understood locally, nationally, and globally, and how they do so in the wider context of their complex relationship with economic globalism. Rather than merely educating students for their chosen career path, Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen outline a notion of “transformative cosmopolitanism” as a way of developing a type of “intellectual thinking” that they describe as a process of appreciating the interconnected aspects of globalization from a variety of different angles, including the social, ethical, environmental, and cultural, as well as the economic and technical dimensions.52 In this way it may be possible to balance the competing corporate and ethical dimensions of the contemporary university by emphasizing the importance of values-based education and students’ responsibility to engage with this form of techno-social criticality. This would mean challenging the insistence on a disciplinary mindset and on measuring and quantifying outcomes in a totalizing and reductive fashion.53 Relativistic epistemologies tend not to promote engagement with values-based education emphasizing tolerance and multiculturalism; on the contrary, they may promote inaction and complacency. Kathleen Lilley, Michelle Baker, and Neil Harris argue that while there is little evidence of universities at present upholding their ambition to educate global citizens, it remains a university responsibility.54 In this vein, they identify the role of the “thought leader,” who “acting beyond the role of corporate CEO and within a global citizen mindset,” has the “potential to reinvigorate the societal potential of universities, and promote valuesbased education” and support “organizational processes, and pedagogical practices directed towards educating ethical thinking global citizens as well as skilled professionals.”55 We have seen that technology plays a vital role in the reproduction of the neoliberal digital economy. But it needs to be harnessed to enable students to identify as global citizens by facilitating communication across different disciplinary and national contexts, promoting ethical forms of design education, and committing to open agendas, data literacy, and transparency. The Covid-19 crisis has led to considerable discussion about the vision for post-pandemic higher education and the role of online education within it. It seems clear that a more interconnected world may be prone to more crises, whether from the return of more virulent

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forms of the virus or through climate change and other disruptive socioeconomic events on a global scale. There may be shorter intervals between disruptive events that take place on a scale that threatens human survival, and in turn there will be less time to prepare and take action. The pandemic has led to remote forms of online teaching driven by the technology rather than by approaches informed by coherent pedagogy. While constructivism is much touted as the approach to underpin these emergency measures, it is worth recalling that constructivism was a theory developed in the 1930s, long before digital technologies emerged. The turn toward remote forms of online education nevertheless poses important questions, but it does not address the deeper question of what the most appropriate form of pedagogy is for an age of global disruption and “wicked” problems. Wicked problems are defined as those that are intensely difficult if not impossible to solve because they involve many interdependent factors and a rapidly changing context. Rather than produce an instrumentalist vision of projectbased learning focused purely on knowledge and skills, we require a more holistic approach to counter them, as Finn T. Hansen argues: To “solve” wicked problems in organisations of super complexity and in an age of uncertainty requires innovators, scientists and professionals that have a sense for the existential and ethical dimensions. Some “wicked problems” might be mastered … through bringing in new unexpected expert knowledge and a decision-making that is guided by a trans-disciplinary field of professionals as well as politicians and lay people from the public domain.56 An understanding of wicked problems and global challenges reveals that they require truly global cooperation, a conclusion that puts universities in a strategic position to draw on their interdisciplinary strengths to leverage collaboration. Internationalization has put universities in a position from which to advocate a strategy of action based on the importance of global skills and global knowledge. While internationalization has been driven, as we have said above, by economics, in order to address and solve new global challenges, teaching and learning focused on global citizenship will have to become increasingly important in the age of environmental disruption.57 Mobility may be one part of this envisaged new curriculum, but the skillsets to enable teachers and students to engage with these new problems should be central to new forms of cross-curricular and cross-cultural competencies. Cross-curricular means cross-disciplinary, decentering the privileged perspective of any one approach, methodology, subject area, and competency to make teachers and students much more aware of local and global contexts. Project-based learning is one area that has developed to meet this challenge. As the organizing and structuring principle of the curriculum, project-based learning engages students with real-life problem-solving situations and use a variety of disciplines in order to produce a solution, including engineering, science, maths, the humanities, and languages.58 Through this approach, students can experience studying abroad, internships, and the comingling of a variety of disciplines to solve problems in their local communities and/or in the wider world through telecollaboration and other forms of digital communication to facilitate multinational virtual teams.59 Global citizenship programs have proliferated in recent years with some taking the path of corporate skills, social skills, and/or advocacy.60 The corporate emphasis is in line with neoliberal approaches to higher education as preparation for work. This does not need to be

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an either/or approach, however, and programs can prepare students to work in corporations through the development of corporate and social skillsets. The grand global challenges of the age of disruption require an interdisciplinary approach to climate change, the pandemic, sustainability, inequality, and socioeconomic disadvantage. In order for this to work, the principles of global citizenship education need to be integrated into every module rather than be positioned as a standalone discrete program.61 The alternative vision of education then aims to position universities to work in closer dialogue with the public sphere and impact agenda through civic-engagement activities.62 It also engages the university community in a research agenda and involves finding solutions to grand challenges by underlining the importance of university space as one that engages its students and stakeholders as partners in critical reflection. This metaphysical dimension trumps the reductive insistence on universities as mere job training centers or skills agencies. Addressing grand challenges can not only be accomplished through digital skills, however, but by acquiring the existential skills that enable students to reflect on how to live well, how to age well, and how to die well. Thus acting in the world (what skills do I need), based on what knowledge (what do I need to know), is related to a much more fundamental question about what gives purpose to my life, and thus in the current age, it provides the upper hand to epistemology on questions of being or ontology in a market-driven economy. Through the influence of globalization, many universities have grown too big too quickly and are now dependent on their world reach rather than their own domestic markets, a fact that exposes them to significant financial risks as Covid-19 has shown. Solving the problem of Covid-19 is not purely a technical issue but one that requires us to reflect on the interdependency of our being-in-the world. The virus has led to deeper questions that require us to also reflect on the neutrality of the new normality. Students and teachers must reclaim this sense of living “beyond certainty” for only that way can the university forsake its narrow vocation within a neoliberal economy.63 Educational institutions do not merely replicate the existing social order; it is also their responsibility to question it. This process must reengage with uncertainty and wonder, and the ability, as Keats said, to have negative capability in order to live with uncertainty.64 Ronald Barnett distinguishes between the Heideggerian meanings of the term ontic (meaning common sense and pragmatism) and the ontological (meaning epistemological).65 Rather than seeing them as opposed, they share in common the need to be joined by a reflective process. As Hansen argues, “The pragmatic and scientific explaining-seeking How- and Why- questions should not be confused with the phenomenological ‘How-thephenomenon-shows-itself-question’ or the philosophical and existential ‘Why-question.’ This kind of contemplation is evoked through an existential philosophical approach as well as an aesthetic one.”66 The society-oriented approach to higher education and innovation underlines the importance of a “missing dimension,” namely, one connected with “meaning, ethics and being.” Likewise, Hansen’s approach to “wonder labs” is based on the need to solve problems by acknowledging the “required phenomenological and existential reflections in those different contexts” to give voice to a “new kind of metaphysical university.”67 This is a form of cross-curricular pedagogy that does not pitch one side against the other, sciences against humanities, but draws on the different aspects of their dimensions. Hansen calls this the “re-enchantment of the university,” in which these often opposing disciplines aim to achieve a balance in order to make an argument “for why radical and meaning-driven innovation in higher education can be nurtured by an ontological and possible also preontological wonder.”68

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Since their inception universities have been shaped by public and private discourses in the form of the church, the state, and latterly the neoliberal market and global economy.69 Across this landscape we have seen how the vision of universities has moved from a preoccupation with a values-based approach to learning and knowledge for its own sake to a concern with knowledge for employment. The pendulum has swung too far in this direction and we need to consider the role of universities for delivering education for sustainable development70 in a world increasingly vulnerable to its own interdependency, and as Glauco De Vita and Peter Case suggest, to rediscover education as “a social service that puts intellectual and moral welfare above profitability and which, therefore, can neither be driven by economic considerations nor be fulfilled by market forces.”71

CONCLUSION Neoliberal globalization has deeply affected the landscape of public higher education in the UK as in other parts of the world over the last three decades. This is apparent across several areas and reflected in the growing requirement for efficiency and accountability in teaching and research, as well as increasing global competitiveness, accreditation, and promotion of credentials. Research on neoliberalism has been more in evidence in areas such as policy, quality, and institutional management rather than in teaching and learning or digital education, and more research needs to engage in critical work in these areas.72 While internationalization has been foregrounded as a potential solution to marketization discourse, its promise has been all too readily assimilated by it and adapted only in a rather piecemeal way through “infusion” approaches.73 In seeking to address this imbalance, we have argued that global citizenship should not be interpreted as an excuse for the current hegemony of neoliberalism but become an area worthy of further development as an alternative space. Global citizenship education can be seen as an intervention dealing with the grand challenges of the Anthropocene era, such as migration, inequality, sustainable development, climate change, changing demographics, globalization, developments in technology, and artificial intelligence.74 Each presents areas of international strategic concern and requires a collective, cross-disciplinary, and cross-national response. As we look around our pandemic world, it is worth remembering other periods that experienced similar disruption, and we need to educate young people to possess a mindset to enable them to deal with disruption, even constant interruption and uncertainty, which will characterize much of this century. The worlding of education along global citizenship education lines positions learning as a process of design (of things, events, solutions, communities, identities, futures, etc.) within a supportive community of practice and a range of meaningful contexts in which learners have productive agency to co-create the worlds in and around them.75 It also seeks to challenge the “role distortion” involved in making academics subservient to their fee-paying customers, by positioning students as leaders of change who take the initiative to solve complex problems (including education, health, quality of life, and environment) using design thinking in interaction with technology and stories. Learners are actively engaged, individually and collectively, in a design cycle of questioning, investigating, prototyping, evaluating and refining. Encouraging experimentation, sensible risk taking, and moderate uncertainty offers potential for (1) “unshackling the conditioning forces” that prevent learners from seeing beyond the status quo; (2) practicing a worldly form of criticism that doubts and challenges what is taken for granted; and (3) developing better informed and more meaningful relationships between selves, others, and things.76

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When interpreted in this vein, the worlding of higher education can make us more aware of the fragile spaces we inhabit and more open to the dangerous consequences of ever greater economic interdependency. Global citizenship education should not be interpreted as an apology for academic complicity with the discourse of neoliberalism nor as a way of avoiding the dissatisfaction with the commercialization of universities. At best it can be seen as a “door to potential educational reform.”77

NOTES 1 Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Higher Education under Late Capitalism: Identity, Conduct, and the Neoliberal Condition (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). See also Derek Bok, Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 2 Henry A. Giroux, Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014). See also Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). 3 Brita Bergland, “The Incompatibility of Neoliberal University Structures and Interdisciplinary Knowledge: A Feminist Slow Scholarship Critique,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 50.11 (2018): 1031–6. 4 Jane Knight, Higher Education in Turmoil: The Changing World of Internationalization (Sense Publishers: Rotterdam, 2008), 22–4. 5 Hans De Wit, Fiona Hunter, Laura Howard, and Eva Egron-Polak, Internationalisation of Higher Education (Brussels: European Union, 2014), 281. 6 Richard Hall, “Technology-Enhanced Learning and Co-operative Practice against the Neoliberal University,” Interactive Learning Environments 24.5 (2016): 1004–15. 7 Larry Cuban, Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology since 1920 (New York: Teachers College Press, 1986). 8 Neil Selwyn, “Re-imaging ‘Learning Analytics’ … A Case for Starting Again,” Internet and Higher Education 46 (2020) [100745]. See also Neil Selwyn and Dragan Gasevic, “The Datafication of Higher Education: Discussing the Promises and Problems,” Teaching in Higher Education 25.4 (2020): 527–40. 9 Rajani Naidoo, Avi Shankar, and Ekant Veer, “The Consumerist Turn in Higher Education: Policy Aspirations and Outcomes,” Journal of Marketing Management 27 (2011): 1142–62. 10 Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2019). 11 Alan Michael Collinge, The Student Loan Scam: The Most Oppressive Debt in U.S. History—and How We Can Fight Back (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009). 12 Felicitas Macgilchrist, Heidrun Allert, and Anne Bruch, “Students and Society in the 2020s: Three Future ‘Histories’ of Education and Technology,” Learning, Media and Technology 45.1 (2020): 76–89. 13 Diane Laurillard, “The Educational Problem that MOOCs Could Solve: Professional Development for Teachers of Disadvantaged Students,” Research in Learning Technology 24 (January 31, 2016), https://journal.alt.ac.uk/index.php/rlt/article/view/1738/pdf_30. 14 Doug Lederman, “MOOC Platforms’ New Model Draws Big Bet from Investors,” Inside Higher Education (May 22, 2019), https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2019/05/22/ investors-bet-big-companies-formerly-known-mooc-providers. 15 Jeannie Rea, “National Survey Reveals a Casual Academic Workforce Struggling to Make a Living and Do their Job,” National Tertiary Education Union (May 30, 2012), http://www.nteu.org.au/ article/National-Survey-reveals-a-Casual-Academic-workforce-struggling-to-make-a-living-and-dotheir-job–12792.

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16 Sophie E. F. Bessant, Zoe P. Robinson, and Mark Ormerod, “Neoliberalism, New Public Management and the Sustainable Development Agenda of Higher Education: History, Contradictions and Synergies,” Environmental Education Research 21.3 (2015): 417–32. 17 Benjamin B. Chang and Peter McLaren, “Emerging Issues of Teaching and Social Justice in Greater China: Neoliberalism and Critical Pedagogy in Hong Kong,” Policy Future in Education 16.6 (2018): 781–803. See also Carrie Mott, Sandra Zupan, and Anne-Marie Debbane, “Making Space for Critical Pedagogy in the Neoliberal University: Struggles and Possibilities,” ACME 14.4 (2015): 1260–82. 18 HWL, “Ways of Worlding,” How We Learn Media & Technology (September 9, 2012), https:// blogs.ubc.ca/hwlmt/2012/09/09/ways-of-worlding/. 19 Jennifer Washburn, University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education (New York: Basic Books, 2005). 20 Andrew M. Whelan, “Academic Critique of Neoliberal Academia,” Sites: A Journal of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies 12.1 (2015): 149. 21 Gaile S. Cannella and Mirka-Koro-Ljunberg, “Neoliberalism in Higher Education: Can We Understand? Can We Resist and Survive? Can We Become without Neoliberalism?” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 17.3 (2017): 158. 22 Ibid., 189. 23 Justin Cruickshank and Ross Abbinnett, “Neoliberalism, Technocracy and Higher Education: Editors’ Introduction,” Social Epistemology 33.4 (2019): 273–79. 24 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2. 25 Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944). 26 Friedrich A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1960). 27 Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades, Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State, and Higher Education (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). 28 Eva B. Petersen, “Resistance and Enrolment in the Enterprise University: An Ethno-drama in Three Acts, with Appended Reading,” Journal of Education Policy 24.4 (2009): 409–22. 29 Marc Bousquet, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-wage Nation (New York: New York University Press, 2008). 30 Stephanie Allais, Selling Out Education: National Qualifications Frameworks and the Neglect of Knowledge (Rotterdam: Sense, 2014). See also Alex Preston, “The War against Humanities at Britain’s Universities,” The Observer, March 29, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/ mar/29/war-against-humanities-at-britains-universities. Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Corporate Humanities in Higher Education: Moving beyond the Neoliberal Academy (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 31 Cris Shore, “Audit Culture and Illiberal Governance: Universities and the Politics of Accountability,” Anthropological Theory 8.3 (2008): 278–99. 32 Lawrence D. Berg, Edward H. Huijbens, and Henrik Gutzon Larsen, “Producing Anxiety in the Neoliberal University,” Canadian Geographer 60.2 (2016): 168–80. 33 Gary Anderson, “How Education Researchers Have Colluded in the Rise of Neoliberalism: What Should the Role of Academics Be in These Trumpian Times?” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 30.10 (2017): 1006–12. 34 Cruickshank and Abbinnett, “Neoliberalism, Technocracy and Higher Education,” 273–79. See also D. C. Hoy, Critical Resistance: From Poststructuralism to Post-Critique (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005). 35 Daniel B. Saunders, “Exploring a Customer Orientation: Free-Market Logic and College Students,” The Review of Higher Education 37 (2014): 197–219. See also Daniel B. Saunders, “Resisting Excellence: Challenging Neoliberal Ideology in Postsecondary Education,” Journal of Critical Education Policy Studies 13 (2015): 391–413.

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36 Henry A. Giroux, “Neoliberalism, Corporate Culture and the Promise of Higher Education: The University as a Democratic Public Sphere,” Harvard Educational Review 72.4 (2002): 425–63. See also Henry A. Giroux, “Bare Pedagogy and the Scourge of Neoliberalism: Rethinking Higher Education as a Democratic Public Sphere,” The Educational Forum 74.3 (2010): 184–96. 37 Gustavo González-Calvo and M. Marta Arias-Carballal, “Effects from Audit Culture and Neoliberalism on University Teaching: An Autoethnographic Perspective,” Ethnography and Education 13.4 (2018): 413–27. 38 Magda N. Kobakhidze, “Desacralising Teachers: Inside Myanmar’s Educational Capitalism,” Globalisation, Societies and Education 18.5 (2020): 1–14, https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2020 .1776098. 39 Neil Selwyn and Keri Facer, eds., The Politics of Education and Technology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 40 Michael Thomas, ed., Deconstructing Digital Natives: Technology, Young People and the New Literacies (London: Routledge, 2011). 41 Stephen J. Ball, “Performativity, Commodification and Commitment: An I-Spy Guide to the Neoliberal University,” British Journal of Educational Studies 60.1 (2012): 17–28. See also Stephen J. Ball, “Living the Neoliberal University,” European Journal of Education 50.3 (2015): 258–61. 42 Thomas, Deconstructing Digital Natives. 43 Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti, Gert Biesta, and Cash Ahenakew, “Between the Nation and the Globe: Education for Global Mindedness in Finland,” Globalisation, Societies and Education 13.2 (2015): 246–59. See also Steven P. Camicia and Barry M. Franklin, “What Type of Global Community and Citizenship? Tangled Discourses of Neoliberalism and Critical Democracy in Curriculum and its Reform,” Globalisation, Societies and Education, 9.3–4 (2011): 311–22. Also, Alexandre Pais and Marta Costa, “An Ideology Critique of Global Citizenship Education,” Critical Studies in Education 61.1 (2016): 1–16. 44 William C., Smith, Pablo Fraser, Volha Chykina, Sakiko Ikoma, Joseph Levitan, Jing Liu and Julia Mahfouz, “Global Citizenship and the Importance of Education in a Globally Integrated World,” Globalisation, Societies and Education 15.5 (2017): 648–65. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 Irene Davy, Learners without Borders: A Curriculum for Global Citizenship (Cardiff: International Baccalaureate, 2011), 3. 48 Stephen Bax, “Digital Education: Beyond the ‘Wow’ Factor,” in Digital Education: Opportunities for Social Collaboration, ed. Michael Thomas (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 239–56. 49 Colin Wright, “Postcolonial Cosmopolitanisms: Towards a Global Citizenship Education Based on ‘Divisive Universalism,”’ in Postcolonial Perspectives on Global Citizenship Education, eds. Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti and Lynn Mario De Souza (New York: Routledge, 2012), 47–67. 50 Gert Biesta, “Education in the Age of Measurement: On the Need to Reconnect with the Question of the Purpose of Education,” Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability 21 (2009): 33–46. 51 Kathleen Aikens and Kristen Hargis, “Policy Conflicts on the Move: A ‘Mobilities’ Case Study of Neoliberal Postsecondary Policy,” Journal of Education Policy 34.1 (2016): 22–43. 52 Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 53 Giroux, “Bare Pedagogy,” 184–96. 54 Kathleen Lilley, Michelle Baker, and Neil Harris, “Exploring the Process of Global Citizen Learning and the Student Mind-Set,” Journal of Studies in International Education, 9.3 (2014): 225–45. 55 Ibid. 56 Finn T. Hansen, “Learning to Innovate in Higher Education through Deep Wonder,” Philosophy and Theory in Higher Education 1.3 (2019): 69.

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57 Glauco De Vita and Peter Case, “Rethinking the Internationalisation Agenda in UK Higher Education,” Journal of Further and Higher Education 27.4 (2003): 383–98. 58 Gulbahar H. Beckett and Tammy Slater, Global Perspectives on Project-based Language Learning, Teaching, and Assessment: Key Approaches, Technology Tools, and Frameworks (London: Routledge, 2019). 59 Liubov Desiatova, “Project-based Learning as CLIL Approach to Teaching Language,” Humanising Language Teaching 10.5 (2008). See also Michael Thomas and Christel Schneider, Language Teaching with Video-Based Technologies: Creativity and CALL Teacher Education (London: Routledge, 2020). 60 Dell Horey, Tracy Fortune, Toula Nicolacopoulos, Emiko Kashima, and Bernice Mathisen, “Global Citizenship and Higher Education: A Scoping Review of the Empirical Evidence,” Journal of Studies in International Education 22.5 (2018). 61 De Vita and Case, “Rethinking the Internationalisation Agenda,” 383–98. 62 Giroux, “Bare Pedagogy and the Scourge of Neoliberalism,” 184–96. 63 David Jefferess, “Global Citizenship and the Cultural Politics of Benevolence,” Critical Literacy: Theories and Practices 2.1 (2008): 27–36. 64 H. E. Rollins, ed., The Letters of John Keats, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 193–94. 65 Ronald Barnett, “Learning for an Unknown Future,” Higher Education Research & Development 23.3 (2004): 247–60. See also Ronald Barnett, A Will to Learn: Being a Student in an Age of Uncertainty (Maidenhead: Open University, 2007). 66 Hansen, “Learning to Innovate,” 65. 67 Ibid., 71. 68 Ibid. 69 Bruce Macfarlane, “Reclaiming Democratic Values in the Future University,” Philosophy and Theory in Higher Education 1.3 (2019): 51–74. 70 John Huckle and Arjen E. J. Wals, “The UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development: Business as Usual in the End,” Environmental Education Research 21.3 (2015): 491–505. 71 De Vita and Case, “Rethinking the Internationalisation Agenda,” 385. 72 Malcom Tight, “The Neoliberal Turn in Higher Education,” Higher Education Quarterly 73 (2019): 273–84. 73 De Vita and Case, “Rethinking the Internationalisation Agenda,” 383–98. 74 Ryan E. Gildersleeve, “The Neoliberal Academy of the Anthropocene and the Retaliation of the Lazy Academic,” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 17.3 (2017): 286–93. 75 HWL, “Ways of Worlding.” 76 Ibid. 77 De Vita and Case, “Rethinking the Internationalisation Agenda,” 394.

WORKS CITED Aikens, Kathleen, and Kristen Hargis. “Policy Conflicts on the Move: A ‘Mobilities’ Case Study of Neoliberal Postsecondary Policy.” Journal of Education Policy 34.1 (2016): 22–43. Allais, Stephanie. Selling Out Education: National Qualifications Frameworks and the Neglect of Knowledge. Rotterdam: Sense, 2014. Anderson, Gary. “How Education Researchers Have Colluded in the Rise of Neoliberalism: What Should the Role of Academics Be in These Trumpian Times?” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 30.10 (2017): 1006–12. Andreotti, Vanessa de Oliveira, Gert Biesta, and Cash Ahenakew. “Between the Nation and the Globe: Education for Global Mindedness in Finland.” Globalisation, Societies and Education 13.2 (2015): 246–59.

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Ball, Stephen J. “Living the Neoliberal University.” European Journal of Education 50.3 (2015): 258–61. Ball, Stephen J. “Performativity, Commodification and Commitment: An I-Spy Guide to the Neoliberal University.” British Journal of Educational Studies 60.1 (2012): 17–28. Barnett, Ronald. “Learning for an Unknown Future.” Higher Education Research & Development 23.3 (2004): 247–60. Barnett, Ronald. A Will to Learn: Being a Student in an Age of Uncertainty. Maidenhead: Open University, 2007. Bax, Stephen. “Digital Education: Beyond the ‘Wow’ Factor.” In Digital Education: Opportunities for Social Collaboration. Ed. Michael Thomas. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 239–56. Beckett, Gulbahar H., and Tammy Slater. Global Perspectives on Project-based Language Learning, Teaching, and Assessment: Key Approaches, Technology Tools, and Frameworks. London: Routledge, 2019. Berg, Lawrence D., Edward H. Huijbens, and Henrik Gutzon Larsen. “Producing Anxiety in the Neoliberal University.” Canadian Geographer 60.2 (2016): 168–80. Bergland, Brita. “The Incompatibility of Neoliberal University Structures and Interdisciplinary Knowledge: A Feminist Slow Scholarship Critique.” Educational Philosophy and Theory 50.11 (2018): 1031–36. Bessant, Sophie E. F., Zoe P. Robinson, and Mark Ormerod. “Neoliberalism, New Public Management and the Sustainable Development Agenda of Higher Education: History, Contradictions and Synergies.” Environmental Education Research 21.3 (2015): 417–32. Biesta, Gert. “Education in the Age of Measurement: On the Need to Reconnect with the Question of the Purpose of Education.” Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability 21 (2009): 33–46. Bok, Derek. Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Bousquet, Marc. How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-wage Nation. New York: New York University Press, 2008. Camicia, Steven P., and Barry M. Franklin. “What Type of Global Community and Citizenship? Tangled Discourses of Neoliberalism and Critical Democracy in Curriculum and its Reform.” Globalisation, Societies and Education, 9.3–4 (2011): 311–22. Cannella, Gaile S., and Mirka-Koro-Ljunberg. “Neoliberalism in Higher Education: Can We Understand? Can We Resist and Survive? Can We Become without Neoliberalism?” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 17.3 (2017): 155–62. Chang, Benjamin B., and Peter McLaren. “Emerging Issues of Teaching and Social Justice in Greater China: Neoliberalism and Critical Pedagogy in Hong Kong.” Policy Future in Education 16.6 (2018): 781–803. Collinge, Alan Michael. The Student Loan Scam: The Most Oppressive Debt in U.S. History—and How We Can Fight Back. Boston: Beacon Press, 2009. Cruickshank, Justin and Ross Abbinnett. “Neoliberalism, Technocracy and Higher Education: Editors’ Introduction.” Social Epistemology 33.4 (2019): 273–79. Cuban, Larry. Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology since 1920. New York: Teachers College Press, 1986. Davy, Irene. Learners without Borders: A Curriculum for Global Citizenship. Cardiff: International Baccalaureate, 2011. De Vita, Glauco and Peter Case. “Rethinking the Internationalisation Agenda in UK Higher Education.” Journal of Further and Higher Education 27.4 (2003): 383–98. De Wit, Hans, Fiona Hunter, Laura Howard, and Eva Egron-Polak. Internationalisation of Higher Education. Brussels: European Union, 2014. Di Leo, Jeffrey R. Corporate Humanities in Higher Education: Moving beyond the Neoliberal Academy. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Di Leo, Jeffrey R. Higher Education under Late Capitalism: Identity, Conduct and the Neoliberal Condition. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Desiatova, Liubov. “Project-based Learning as CLIL Approach to Teaching Language.” Humanising Language Teaching 10.5 (2008). http://old.hltmag.co.uk/oct08/sart02.html.

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Gildersleeve, Ryan E. “The Neoliberal Academy of the Anthropocene and the Retaliation of the Lazy Academic.” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 17.3 (2017): 286–93. Giroux, Henry A. “Bare Pedagogy and the Scourge of Neoliberalism: Rethinking Higher Education as a Democratic Public Sphere.” The Educational Forum 74.3 (2010): 184–96. Giroux, Henry A. “Neoliberalism, Corporate Culture and the Promise of Higher Education: The University as a Democratic Public Sphere.” Harvard Educational Review 72.4 (2002): 425–63. Giroux, Henry A. Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014. González-Calvo, Gustavo and M. Marta Arias-Carballal. “Effects from Audit Culture and Neoliberalism on University Teaching: An Autoethnographic Perspective.” Ethnography and Education 13.4 (2018): 413–27. Hall, Richard. “Technology-Enhanced Learning and Co-operative Practice against the Neoliberal University.” Interactive Learning Environments 24.5 (2016): 1004–15. Hansen, Finn T. “Learning to Innovate in Higher Education through Deep Wonder.” Philosophy and Theory in Higher Education 1.3 (2019): 51–74. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Hayek, Friedrich A. The Constitution of Liberty. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1960. Hayek, Friedrich A. The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944. Horey, Dell, Tracy Fortune, Toula Nicolacopoulos, Emiko Kashima, and Bernice Mathisen. “Global Citizenship and Higher Education: A Scoping Review of the Empirical Evidence.” Journal of Studies in International Education 22.5 (2018): 472–92. Hoy, D. C. Critical Resistance: From Poststructuralism to Post-Critique. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005. Huckle, J., and Arjen E. J. Wals. “The UN Decade of Education and Sustainable Development: Business as Usual in the End.” Environmental Education Research 21.3 (2015): 491–505. HWL. “Ways of Worlding.” How We Learn Media & Technology September 9, 2012. https://blogs. ubc.ca/hwlmt/2012/09/09/ways-of-worlding/. Jefferess, David. “Global Citizenship and the Cultural Politics of Benevolence.” Critical Literacy: Theories and Practices 2.1 (2008): 27–36. Kobakhidze, Magda N. “Desacralising Teachers: Inside Myanmar’s Educational Capitalism.” Globalisation, Societies and Education 18.5 (2020): 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2020 .1776098. Knight, Jane. Higher Education in Turmoil: The Changing World of Internationalization. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2008. Laurillard, Diane. “The Educational Problem That MOOCs Could Solve: Professional Development for Teachers of Disadvantaged Students.” Research in Learning Technology 24 (January 31, 2016). https://journal.alt.ac.uk/index.php/rlt/article/view/1738/pdf_30. Lederman, Doug. “MOOC Platforms” New Model Draws Big Bet from Investors. Inside Higher Education (May 22, 2019). https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2019/05/22/ investors-bet-big-companies-formerly-known-mooc-providers. Lilley, Kathleen, Michelle Baker, and Neil Harris. “Exploring the Process of Global Citizen Learning and the Student Mind-Set.” Journal of Studies in International Education, 9.3 (2014): 225–245. Macfarlane, Bruce. “Reclaiming Democratic Values in the Future University.” Philosophy and Theory in Higher Education 1.3 (2019): 51–74. Macgilchrist, Felicitas, Heidrun Allert, and Anne Bruch. “Students and Society in the 2020s: Three Future ‘Histories’ of Education and Technology.” Learning, Media and Technology 45.1 (2020): 76–89. Mott, Carrie, Sandra Zupan, and Anne-Marie Debbane. “Making Space for Critical Pedagogy in the Neoliberal University: Struggles and Possibilities.” ACME 14.4 (2015): 1260–82. Naidoo, Rajani, Avi Shankar, and Ekant Veer. “The Consumerist Turn in Higher Education: Policy Aspirations and Outcomes.” Journal of Marketing Management 27 (2011): 1142–62. Pais, Alexandre, and Marta Costa. “An Ideology Critique of Global Citizenship Education.” Critical Studies in Education 61.1 (2016): 1–16. Petersen, Eva B. (2009). “Resistance and Enrolment in the Enterprise University: An Ethno-drama in Three Acts, with Appended Reading.” Journal of Education Policy 24.4 (2009): 409–22. Preston, Alex. “The War against Humanities at Britain’s Universities.” The Observer, March 29, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/mar/29/war-against-humanities-at-britainsuniversities.

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Rea, Jeannie. “National Survey Reveals a Casual Academic Workforce Struggling to Make a Living and Do their Job.” National Tertiary Education Union, May 30, 2012. http://www.nteu.org.au/ article/National-Survey-reveals-a-Casual-Academic-workforce-struggling-to-make-a-living-and-dotheir-job–12792. Readings, Bill. The University in Ruins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Rollins, H. E., ed. The Letters of John Keats. 2 Vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958. Saunders, Daniel B. “Exploring a Customer Orientation: Free-Market Logic and College Students.” The Review of Higher Education 37 (2014): 197–219. Saunders, Daniel B. “Resisting Excellence: Challenging Neoliberal Ideology in Postsecondary Education.” Journal of Critical Education Policy Studies 13 (2015): 391–413. Saunders, Daniel B., and Gerardo B. Ramirez. “Resisting the Neoliberalization of Higher Education: A Challenge to Commonsensical Understandings of Commodities and Consumption.” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 17.3 (2017): 189–96. Selwyn, Neil. “Re-imaging ‘Learning Analytics’ … a Case for Starting Again.” Internet and Higher Education 46 (2020): [100745]. Selwyn, Neil, and Keri Facer, eds. The Politics of Education and Technology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Selwyn, Neil, and Dragan Gasevic. “The Datafication of Higher Education: Discussing the Promises and Problems.” Teaching in Higher Education 25.4 (2020): 527–40. Shore, Cris. “Audit Culture and Illiberal Governance: Universities and the Politics of Accountability.” Anthropological Theory 8.3 (2008): 278–99. Slaughter, Sheila, and Gary Rhoades. Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State, and Higher Education. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Smith, William C., Pablo Fraser, Volha Chykina, Sakiko Ikoma, Joseph Levitan, Jing Liu, and Julia Mahfouz. “Global Citizenship and the Importance of Education in a Globally Integrated World.” Globalisation, Societies and Education 15.5 (2017): 648–65. Thomas, Michael, ed. Deconstructing Digital Natives: Technology, Young People and the New Literacies. London: Routledge, 2011. Thomas, Michael, and Christel Schneider. Language Teaching with Video-Based Technologies: Creativity and CALL Teacher Education. London: Routledge, 2020. Tight, Malcom. “The Neoliberal Turn in Higher Education.” Higher Education Quarterly 73 (2019): 273–84. Vertovec, Steven, and Robin Cohen. Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context and Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Washburn, Jennifer. University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education. New York: Basic Books, 2005. Whelan, Andrew M. “Academic Critique of Neoliberal Academia.” Sites: A Journal of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies 12.1 (2015): 130–52. Wright, Colin. “Postcolonial Cosmopolitanisms: Towards a Global Citizenship Education Based on ‘Divisive Universalism.’” In Postcolonial Perspectives on Global Citizenship Education. Eds. Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti and Lynn Mario De Souza. New York: Routledge, 2012. 47–67. Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: Public Affairs, 2019.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Worlding Public Policy KENNETH J. SALTMAN

INTRODUCTION A for-profit social emotional learning (SEL) program called “Centervention Zoo U” teaches emotional and social skills by putting children in front of games on screens.1 A for-profit classroom management program called Class Dojo, which is in 80 percent of US schools, uses behaviorism to levy disciplinary practices for surveillance on children while inducing them to generate commercially valuable data.2 A for-profit real-time webcam biometric product called “Affdex” measures students’ physical movements and translates them into interest and disinterest, positive and negative valence, and treats teaching and learning as physiological effects on bodies.3 These examples typify a growing global industry in SEL technology products that quantify student behavior, track student data, and allow investors to expand a growing frontier in educational privatization. Despite the lack of strong research evidence for the efficacy of such products, profits are being sought by these companies and investors through selling technology services to public schools, getting students and teachers to produce commercially valuable data, generating enormous profits in Social Impact Bonds, and increasingly securitizing these bonds as speculative investments.4 Globally, educational privatization is expanding in new directions characterized by the trade in data and digital technologies, the making of students and teachers into data engines, and the use of data and digital technologies to expand impact investment schemes.5 The quantification of so-called academic achievement in the form of standardized testing has long been big business benefiting particularly test and textbook companies.6 Education and technology sectors have been converging as test and textbook publishing education companies like Houghton-Mifflin, ETS, Pearson, and Kaplan have increasingly become technology companies, and technology companies have increasingly become education companies.7 However, the quantification and datafication of affect, student behavior, learned dispositions particularly for self-control, and so-called “soft-skills” under the rubric of SEL are at the center of the new forms of technology-oriented privatization on a global scale.8 Such social quantification projects in SEL employ artificial intelligence education technologies such as adaptive learning technologies, biometric pedagogy devices like realtime webcam systems, video games, and avatars. The increasing turn to harnessing the daily activities of students, teachers, and administrators as data manufacturers via technology and the financial securitization of this data builds on long-standing dominant trends of profit seeking in education. That is, such technologies displace the labor costs of teachers and allow corporations to capture public education tax dollars by replacing the work and meaningmaking activities of teachers with corporate technology in the form of contracting.9 The trade

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in and devising of impact investment financial instruments based in student data-making represent a new major source of school profit seeking.10 This steady expansion of digital profiteering in public schooling needs to be understood not merely as a consequence of new technologies but rather as part of a broader class-based global project for hegemonic control by the transnational capitalist class.11 As William I. Robinson argues, crises of capital overaccumulation and state legitimacy have resulted in strategies for “militarized accumulation” to expand markets into hitherto uncolonized places, including the lifeworld and subjectivity.12 Globally, public education has been positioned by ruling-class ideologues and profiteers as ripe for economic pillage. Supranational organizations (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, World Economic Forum [WEF], and World Bank), venture philanthropies (Gates, Rockefeller) and philanthrocapitalist organizations (Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Omidyar, Emerson), corporate foundations, consultancies, lobbyists, and think tanks join with investing banks to form a coordinated movement to fund, politically influence, and create the ideologies to support the expansion of educational privatization. Such privatization shifts ownership and control of schools and education to private actors, siphons money out of the educational process, and influences content and control of curriculum and pedagogical approaches. In the United States, public education represents at least half a trillion dollars a year that can be taken through privatizations.13 Some of the more well-known forms of these educational privatizations that have continued since the 1980s include charters, vouchers, scholarship tax credits (tax-based vouchers), contracting, the privatization of teacher education, student teaching, and educational leadership.14 Among these dominant privatizations of past decades are others that are less known. For example, the charter school real estate and charter bond industries are massive with predictions of a potential trillion dollar charter bond bubble bursting.15 What is still less evident to the public is the recent rapid growth of two major new forms of educational privatization that are in fact converging: (1) impact investing schemes that promote privatization of education such as venture philanthropy and Social Impact Bonds and (2) data-producing educational technologies. The specific form of digital capitalist pillage of the lifeworld takes shape as what Nick Couldry and Ulises Meijas refer to as the industries of social quantification.16 What I am detailing here is the ways that these two forms of privatization, SEL and Impact Investing, are coming together in part through the quantification of affect and behavior particularly through the discourse of SEL that is being promoted by supranational organizations, corporations, investors, and philanthropic foundations. Major supranational organizations that represent the transnational capitalist class such as the OECD and WEF are leading the trend of actively promoting and developing standards for the quantification of SEL.17 These supranational organizations as well as global figures such as Bill Gates and a number of large technology companies seized on the Covid-19 pandemic spreading globally in the spring of 2020 to advocate for the global expansion of online learning and to question the return to brick and mortar schooling.18 Even as, under quarantine, parents around the world got a sudden added appreciation for the hard work that teachers do, the preachers of neoliberal education such as Gates, Andrew Cuomo, and Education Secretary Betsey Devos, among others, used the pandemic to advance privatization and the agenda of technology companies, investors, and rightist ideologues of “unbundling” public schooling—that is, transforming it into a collection of discreet private services like cable TV.19 The “unbundling” and “rethinking education as we know it” agendas have long been an aim discussed in the publications of rightist think tanks.20

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In part, this chapter seeks to explain and reconcile what on the surface appear to be two seemingly contradictory directions of educational reform, policy, and practice between freedom and domination. On the one hand, new educational technologies, including Artificial Intelligence (AI), adaptive learning, biometric pedagogy, blockchain, and Internet of Things, are promoted by proponents as transforming the process of schooling through promises of freedom from coercion, promises of respect for student individual differences, and learning that is “personalized.” These technologies measure, quantify, datafy, and normalize behavior and affect while making student activity into data manufacture.21 Such promises of freedom, attention to difference, context, and specificity are framed as overcoming the long-standing standards and accountability movements that have been interwoven with neoliberal educational restructuring. Citizens, parents, and teachers have widely rebelled against the central characteristics of the neoliberal standards and accountability movement that has been in force since 2000. The standards and accountability movement was characterized by “excessive” standardized testing, teaching to the test, standardization and homogenization of curriculum, disregard for student subjectivity, disregard for context, and disregard for culture. Indeed, SEL developed largely in response to these trends. SEL seemingly emphasizes the need to attend to student’s subjectivity—a subjectivity largely denied through the objectivistic tendencies of the accountability movement with its revival of the radical empiricist and industrial transmission traditions of education. Radical empiricism framed education as filling the empty vessel with knowledge through ever greater efficiencies derived from measurement and control. In the United States, SEL was propelled by the Every Student Succeeds Act (2015) that made non-academic achievement measures of student progress—a response to public antipathy to excessive testing and standardization expressed in No Child Left Behind (2002) and the Common Core (2010) (laws that were aggressively lobbied into existence respectively by educational test and textbook publishers and Gates). SEL purports to offer remedies to individual psychological and related physical trauma born of violent contexts, providing tools for students to modify their behavior and dispositions.22 For example, grit pedagogies seek to teach persistence albeit largely through behaviorist techniques; mindfulness and meditation pedagogies teach traumatized students to turn away from hostile contexts and develop peaceful dispositions by focusing inward on the self.23 Like SEL, new digital technologies such as, for example, CZI’s Summit have sought to sell their program in contradistinction from the standards and accountability movement as well. CZI promotes Summit adaptive learning technology through a promise of “personalization,” a departure from high stakes testing, and the decentering of the teacher as the locus of knowledge, instead promoting collaborative learning.24 On the other hand, what has been framed as freedom, individualism, and attention to difference is often its opposite: standardized, homogenized, and oriented around hierarchical modes of authority. CZI’s Summit, for example, despite its promotion as personalized and sensitive to difference, disregards student subjectivity, the relationship between learning and student experience and cultural context, and installs constant testing as the mode of pedagogy, all in a form that emulates and celebrates corporate culture and the corporate workplace.25 Or consider biometric analytic pedagogy that promises to offer teachers technological tools to respond to individual students’ interest and disinterest in a topic by measuring a student’s physical response to a lesson. Biometric technology such as Affdex uses webcams to measure the facial reactions of students and then analyzes and interprets the data as positive or negative valence, attention or disinterest.26 Despite promising individualization, biometric

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pedagogy makes teaching into a scripted performance and evacuates from the learning process thinking, consciousness, and mediation while modeling pedagogy on television advertisement market research for physiological excitation.27 In both of these examples, students generate behavioral data that is of commercial value.

SOCIAL EMOTIONAL LEARNING SEL, while not unitary, is largely characterized by liberal discourse that purports to teach character: self and social awareness, self-control, relationship skills like teamwork and conflict resolution, and “ethical” decision-making skills. SEL encourages resilience to existing social conditions, such as poverty and inequality, and the traumas that they cause. SEL appears to turn to a focus on the subjectivity of students. The promise of SEL is one of academic and then social inclusion if only the student can regulate her habits, behavior, and dispositions. SEL programs tend to promote a conception of agency characterized by accommodation to existing social arrangements and institutions rather than transformation of them. SEL programs tend to reject conflict and contestation in favor of valuing consensus-building while tending not to recognize systemic and structural power relations that consensus conceals and that favor groups with more social power. Though commonly framed as apolitical, SEL does have a politics. The politics of SEL clearly contrasts with the tradition of critical pedagogy that educates youth to analyze, theorize, and link learning to projects that respond to structural and systematic forms of oppression and inequality. Critical pedagogy makes learning the basis for reconceptualizing the self and the society and makes understanding the basis for collective social power. SEL teaches coping skills and dispositions for individual survival within existing institutions and relations of power. SEL programs take seemingly different forms including: learned self-management of emotions, grit pedagogies that are about learned endurance of drudgery, mindfulness/meditation projects that turn focus inward and away from the forces that produce poverty and violence, and “restorative justice” or other conflict resolution programs that seek largely individualized and developmental psychological modes of translating public and political problems into personal problems.28 These programs are united by an aim to largely teach economically and culturally oppressed youth self-regulation, social relationships, and dispositions for submission to authority and for collaboration within existing social forms and institutions. Proponents of SEL seek to show that by developing particular skills and dispositions, students will have greater opportunity for traditional academic and then social success. Significantly, SEL tends to affirm learning and knowledge as politically neutral. Emotional adjustment serves the transmission of knowledge for work and consumption opportunities in the market economy. Such a view denies the cultural politics of knowledge and curriculum and delinks learning from self and social transformation. Specifically, SEL programs tend to deny the relevance of social antagonisms, structural power relations, and the ways the self is formed through these social antagonisms. Consequently, SEL programs tend not to foster collective political agency that would allow public problems to be collectively addressed through learning and experienced as objects of critical analysis. Instead, as in the liberal philosophical tradition, these projects offer individualistic conceptions of agency, delinking learning from its socially transformative capacity. The aim of making “resilient” subjects puts the onus for the destruction of structural inequality onto the individual student. Such individualizing of responsibility for responding

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to social violence benefits ruling groups and classes who do not have to give anything up to create the social conditions for economic equality, political power sharing, and cultural institutions structured in deeply democratic ways. More specifically, the new form of character education allows ruling-class people to evade paying for public education that would give everyone the kind of schools that the richest have and remedy the historical failure to do so. Worse yet, new contracting in the technologies of character formation allows ruling-class people to profit from displacing blame onto those who did not make the conditions that they suffer and endure. The “resilient” student through learned self-control can allegedly be made to withstand the violence of poverty and all of its ancillary effects and withstand symbolic violence that positions them as embodying cultural deficits. As I have argued elsewhere, the discourse of resilience strategies such as “grit” needs to be understood as neoliberal character education in an era characterized by shifting the burden for social service provision onto individuals.29

DATA PRIVATIZATION, IMPACT INVESTING, AND THE QUANTIFICATION OF SOCIAL EMOTIONAL LEARNING Ben Williamson has detailed how the OECD has worked to standardize SEL definitions and standards in order to create the conditions for it to be quantified and datafied.30 Williamson explains that OECD and the WEF aim to stabilize the field of knowledge as a supposed natural science about SEL and create a new policy consensus and common sense about it by drawing together concepts from psychology and economics.31 Key figures who have promoted neoliberal human capital theory, such as James Heckman, are now promoting the quantification of SEL.32 Williamson points out that a central aspect of this project involves establishing bounded norms of selfhood in psychological categories.33 Williamson studies how organizations promoting SEL work with the OECD to create categories and technologies to measure and to quantify SEL. Williamson decries the false claims to objectivity in the discursive production of SEL: “Our main claim is that SELS, as a contested science in the making, embodies attempts by policy influencers to stabilize the field through the production of objectivity, while broadening and consolidating the uses of education technology.”34 As Williamson rightly points out, claims to objectivity “focus on expelling subjectivity.”35 The objectivizing of SEL is a class and cultural project of ruling groups to secure their hegemony by legitimation. The elaborate use of positivist ideology in technology is about securing social power as well as cultural dominance. Perhaps the greatest material interest in objectivizing SEL is to translate it into commercially viable data for those who own and invest in educational technology industries. OECD and WEF reports, websites, and documents show a number of key framing assumptions about the linkage between SEL and data manufacture.36 Among these are as follows: (1) the need for more “private sector involvement” in public education, including public-private partnerships and private financing and investment.37 This presumes that technology corporations and banks need to play a greater role in SEL and its quantification; (2) the alignment of human capital (education as a market-based investment that pays off in expanded labor markets, capitalist growth, and global economic competition) with “psychoinformatics” (techniques and technologies that measure, datafy, track, and analyze behavior, affect, and dispositions such as biometric analytic technologies);38 (3) the need for SEL to be datafied;39 (4) a view of globalization and technology as the key drivers of change akin

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to natural forces producing inequality. Such a perspective does not recognize the extent of class antagonism, domination, and hegemonic struggle.40 Within this view, individual agency takes shape as resilience compelled by “forces of nature.” “Resilience”-thinking does not recognize the extent to which particular versions of globalization (global justice movement versus neoliberal globalization) or technology (technology as tool for equality and freedom from domination versus technophilic capitalism) are collective human products, ideological formations that are far from natural or inevitable, and for their propagation require being ongoingly taught and learned; (5) the so-called “soft skills” promoted by SEL as crucial for economic development and the new directions of industry in the “4th Industrial Revolution.”41 In addition to key framing assumptions, the supranational organizations share certain key constitutive absences that frame their projects. These absences include a tendency to gut educational and social theory and humanities traditions from the discussion of what is needed in schools and society. Rather, they pair up psychological developmental tropes from empiricist traditions with positivist measures of learning expressed through standardized testing. This produces a particular version of the relationship between individual subjects and knowledge in which individual experiences are valuable in relation to learning only as a means of comprehending the proper dispositions for the consumption of knowledge or comprehending blockages to the efficient consumption of knowledge formed by “bad” habits or trauma. In contrast with critical pedagogy, the goal of SEL is not to develop in students the capacity to theorize claims to truth, the self, or the social in relation to authority.42 Nor is the aim to comprehend the politics of knowledge, the extent to which the self is socially formed, nor the contextual dimensions of truth claims to the ends of collective forms of self-governance and social agency.43 That is, SEL has been largely organized to deny contests over curriculum, pedagogical approaches, symbolics, interests, and ideologies. This aspect of SEL that draws on empiricist and developmentalist forms of psychology while eschewing the politics of education has to be recognized as a political framing that largely expresses liberal ideologies of education—the impossible claim that knowledge and curriculum are apolitical and must be framed as “neutral.”44 Consistent with the denial of the politics of knowledge and curriculum, the WEF asserts that children should learn to approach problems “the way a computer would.”45 In this view, all problems are technical and practical problems, not matters of interpretation and judgment. Such a view presumes that there is no place for critical questions about the relationship between the framing of problems and the interests, ideologies, and social locations of particular groups of people. Yet the crucial innovation of the latest push for SEL quantification and measurement is its connection to the industry in digital technology contracting, the trade in data, and the continuing growth of impact investing schemes.

IMPACT INVESTING SEL is not the only mechanism espoused by educational world policy to privatize education on a global scale. In addition to long-standing neoliberal privatization schemes such as vouchers, charters, and scholarship tax credits, innovative education financing has more recently been taking the form of impact investing. Social Impact Bonds, also known as Pay for Success, are a form of public-private partnership. Social Impact Bonds (SIB) began around 2010 and are now global with a particularly strong presence in Europe. SIBs bring together governments like the city of Chicago or the State of Massachusetts, banks such as Goldman

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Sachs, and philanthropic foundations such as Rockefeller Foundation to allow public service arrangements to become financial investments for banks.46 For example, an early-childhood education program in Chicago that was already established as a success was funded by Goldman Sachs with $16.9 million. After the evaluation deemed the program a success, Goldman was paid $30 million by Chicago, allowing the bank to keep the difference.47 Such “public private partnerships” appear as private-sector shakedown schemes. Social Impact Bonds have banks pay for the service, and if the program is deemed successful, then the government pays the bank back with significant additional money. The philanthropies help set up the deals and often are involved in arranging evaluation of the programs. Proponents of Social Impact Bonds claim that these schemes are more accountable than direct government provision of services because of the measurement. Critics suggest that the schemes inflate the costs of already successful programs, allowing banks to bilk the public sector while influencing the program evaluations. Critics also suggest that banks cherry-pick already successful programs to increase the likelihood of success and hence profit taking. Social Impact Bonds depend upon accountability metrics, and new forms of digital education technology such as AI, Internet of Things, and blockchain are becoming the means to expand SIBs. The quantification of SEL is being positioned to facilitate these automated metrics. Educational privatization is expanding significantly in the area of the spread of for-profit digital technology in classrooms. This has several implications for educational finance. Cyber school companies such as K12, Inc. have functioned as Educational Management Organizations, running schools for profit particularly by displacing teachers with technology. Conventional measures of quality reveal extremely low performance for cyber schools,48 with the Covid-19 pandemic reaffirming previous concerns about quality and access. Yet, the WEF used the pandemic as an opportunity to promote its pre-Covid-19 agenda. Technology companies such as Google, Apple, Microsoft, CZI, Emerson Collective, and Omidyar Network have managed to get hardware, software, and adaptive learning technology into schools. Technology outfits stand to fulfill a rightist dream of ending the very conception of the public school and replacing it with collections of private educational services—that is, “unbundling” the school.49 These companies are promoting adaptive learning technologies that frame teachers as technology facilitators. In a financial sense, this stands to allow technology companies to hijack the role of teachers and their salaries regardless of the lack of efficacy established by these experimental approaches to teaching. As well, a new and massive industry in data capture has opened with the introduction of such technology-based learning platforms in schools.50 CZI, for example, built its school model Summit using Facebook engineers, and CZI is acquiring for-profit education companies to expand its cache of student data.51 Datacapture companies are doing an end run around student privacy as third-party users of data are not held accountable to youth privacy laws.52 As adaptive learning technology makes a case of each student, it also sorts and sifts students in a new form of techno-tracking. The latter two “innovative” finance schemes of digital surveillance (facilitated by the quantification and datafication of SEL) and impact investing appear to be converging as impact investors increasingly rely upon digital surveillance to measure and track youth who are rendered into investment commodities. A clear example of this convergence is illustrated by the funding projects of the New Schools Venture Fund, a nonprofit organization started by billionaire venture capitalist John Doerr who was an early financier of Google and Amazon.53 Doerr’s NSVF was a major player in promoting prior yet ongoing forms of educational privatization like charter schooling on the model of venture philanthropy.54 New Schools Venture Fund provides start-up money to mostly for-profit companies contracting with

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public schools. New School Venture Fund lists 117 educational technology ventures on their website. Forty-three businesses that NSVF funds or has funded are for-profit SEL companies. One such company, Centervention (slogan “Focus on Fun because Fun Works”) produces SEL games such as Zoo U that claims to teach students to overcome “extreme reactions to trivial problems” and blurting out in class, as well as to help students “who have trouble making friends.”55 The solution does not involve learning to engage in human interactions with adults and peers. Rather, setting the child in front of a screen for video games will allegedly foster “six key social and emotional skills: communication, cooperation, emotion regulation, empathy, impulse control, social initiation”56 that will cure all nonconforming “bad” behavior. Perhaps what is most troubling about the corporate capture of time and teacher-student interaction in this case is that such games provide students and teachers no investigation of why a particular student might be having these issues or of how the student’s cultural identity and the social and cultural context inform and produce the problem. The SEL product is made meaningful to the student through therapeutic gamification and play instead of via a focus on a student’s actual experiences or the social and cultural context. Gamification and play in SEL are values promoted by the WEF and the Lego Foundation. An entire extremely secretive and extremely under-regulated industry of student data brokers acquires student data from such programs and sells it to advertisers and corporations.57 The data that is compiled from uncompensated students using programs of questionable educational value is then used to market to and manipulate these same youth. As students labor in schools and sometimes at home generating data that is of real commercial value to tech companies in the present, they do so on the dubious future promise that the programs they use may one day allow them to compete to work and consume in exclusionary economic arrangements. According to the WEF, the new digital capitalism in education can teach children “positive examples of global citizenship.” WEF invites children to learn from the Business Roundtable’s social impact initiatives.58 Businesses can also provide children positive examples of global citizenship. The recent announcement from the US Business Roundtable on stakeholder capitalism provides an opportunity for companies to lead by example and invite children to learn from their social impact initiatives.59 In reality, this educational activity produces a vision of global citizenship defined less by global justice and learning for shared political agency and control over social life, than it does a vision for acquiescence to the world as it is. The image of the world such educational strategies give to students is one of consolidating wealth, growing economic inequality, oligarchic government, and cultures of titillating diversion from urgent public matters rather than democratic political, economic, and cultural formations.

MILITARIZED ACCUMULATION, REPRESSIVE EDUCATION, “INNOVATIVE FINANCE” The convergence of digital technology and SEL needs to be understood in relation to broader political economic shifts. The past decade has seen the emergence of two seemingly contradictory trends in education. As I detailed in Scripted Bodies, educational repression has been steadily expanding and needs to be understood in relation not merely to the repressive tendencies of neoliberal ideology but also to the economic imperatives of capital

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accumulation.60 As William I. Robinson argues, crises of capital accumulation and crises of system legitimacy are reconciled by “militarized accumulation.”61 During industrial capitalism until the 1980s, public education served as a resource for ruling-class people by creating an exploitable labor force and inculcating future workers with ideologies conducive to class domination. The possibilities for profit largely came from forging an exploitable labor force. The ideological formation of the era has been referred to as the “hidden curriculum” of capitalism in which schooling conferred key beliefs and dispositions that contributed to both the social relations for capital accumulation and the concealment of the hierarchical class relations behind the public education system.62 In the 1980s, the neoliberal restructuring of public education brought capitalist interests to the fore as the role and purposes of schooling for work, consumption, and national economic competition became overt justifications for schooling. Neoliberal education created the conditions for profit taking through privatization of schools, contracting, and commercialism. Ideologically, neoliberal education openly rationalized all aspects of schooling through the language and logic of business, consumer choice, and competition. School for work and consumption as well as learning for earning had to be quantifiably measurable. The neoliberal era amplified aspects of the logic of industrial production, scientific management, and positivist ideology with regard to knowledge and curriculum, and the fetish for quantifiable controls aiming for ever greater efficiencies with ubiquitous testing, the reduction of teacher quality to student test scores, and the discounting of the aspects of humanity that did not translate into commerce (e.g., STEM). The corporatization and militarization of schools expanded throughout the 1990s as the hierarchical and authoritarian organization of the corporation became the model for schools and their administrators. Repressive trends integral to the neoliberal restructuring of schools included standardization of time and space, a revival of largely discredited repressive pedagogies like behaviorism, and security apparatuses in schools. Charter schools that targeted working class and poor historically disinvested communities and particularly black and brown students tended and still tend to embrace repressive school models. As Nancy Fraser points out, social and cultural reproduction was revised in the post-Fordist era. Fordist modes of self and social control such as learned self-regulation have increasingly given way to direct coercion in the post-Fordist era.63 In education, this has meant that much of the learned self-regulation (Foucauldian discipline) taught in schools for submission to authority in the workplace has given way to coercion: behavior and mood-control drugs, school militarization/ prisonization, scripted lessons, and standardization of knowledge, time, and space. In the past decade, prior repressive and neoliberal tendencies have gotten developed and carried forward through new technologies and techniques of control: neoliberal character education in the form of grit, biometric pedagogy that teaches the body while discounting the mind, tech-based SEL programs that merge character education with tracking, surveillance, and case-making, the making of students into financial securities through impact bond investments that stands to link behavioral profiling and the sorting and sifting of students to investment profits.

CONCLUSION Schools are not merely places for ruling-class people to create profit opportunities and ideological indoctrination. Schools continue to be sites and stakes of ideological and

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material struggle implicated in producing ideologies and common sense, identity positions, and social relations. Progressive and radical schooling traditions were developed during the industrial era. This has been so during the neoliberal era as well. The new phase of digital privatization demands new directions for the making of emancipatory ideologies, identifications, and social relations. Briefly, there are a number of important directions that can be developed. It is crucial for critical scholars to challenge the assumptions about the self and learning undergirding dominant conceptions of SEL. The standards and accountability movement and the neoliberal “global education reform movement” that it is part of can be countered with pedagogies that are not grounded in developmental psychology but rather in critical theories and critical pedagogical traditions. Though often developed with vestiges of positivism, behaviorism, or scientific management, new technologies do not have to be embedded in these same worldviews. New technologies can be put in the service of emancipatory ideologies, and egalitarian social relations can be taught through the use of technologies.64 Pedagogies that take seriously emotion as a starting point can make central a dialectical conception of the self and the social informed by critical pedagogy and critical theory more generally. Such a perspective would recognize that knowledge, curriculum, and pedagogy are contested and that these contests are informed by broader social, economic, political, and cultural antagonisms. As well, unlike SEL, critical pedagogy recognizes that the self is constructed through social antagonisms and that the self in turn forms the social through both reconceptualizing experience and acting on the world. In this view, learning is a practice of self and social ongoing interpretation and analysis. Such interpretation and analysis draw on a number of humanities, social science, and scientific traditions to allow students to comprehend the relationships between learning and social authority, claims to truth, and material and symbolic power. Learning in such a view is not merely a means of adaptation to the existing social world but primarily a tool to shape and transform the world. Lastly, such critical pedagogy cannot be seen as just an educational methodology or an abstract quantity but needs to be comprehended as part of broader social movements for the advance of democratic culture. Such movement necessitates a staunch rejection of the privatization of public education and instead articulates a reinvigorated commitment to public forms of governance and control, public investment and ownership, as well as a commitment to forms of education that can foster democratic cultures in all institutions.

NOTES 1 The Centervention Zoo U website is available at https://www.centervention.com/social-skills-game/. 2 Jamie Manolev, Anna Sullivan, and Roger Slee, “The Datafication of Discipline: Class Dojo, Surveillance, and a Performative Classroom Culture” Learning, Media, and Technology 44:1 (2019): 36–51. 3 Kenneth J. Saltman, Scripted Bodies: Corporate Power, Smart Technologies, and the Undoing of Public Education (New York: Routledge 2016), 55–73. 4 Jill Barshay, “Impact Funds Pour Money into Ed Tech Businesses,” The Hechinger Report, October 21, 2019. 5 Ben Williamson and Nelli Piattoeva, “Objectivity as Standardization in Data-Scientific Education Policy, Technology, and Governance,” Learning, Media and Technology 44.1 (2019): 64–76; eds. Kenneth J. Saltman and Alexander J. Means, The Wiley Handbook of Global Educational Reform (Medford, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2019).

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6 Valerie Strauss detailed the millions of dollars educational publishers invested into lobbying for testing and the billions they reaped. See Valerie Strauss, “Big Education Firms Spend Millions Lobbying for Pro-Testing Policies,” Washington Post, March 30, 2015. 7 Kenneth J. Saltman, Scripted Bodies. 8 World Economic Forum, “Schools of the Future: Defining New Models of Education for the Fourth Industrial Revolution” (January 2020), 1–33; Ben Williamson and Nelli Piattoeva “Objectivity as Standardization,” 64–76. 9 Barshay, “Impact Funds,” 6. 10 Ibid. 11 William I. Robinson, Into the Tempest (Chicago: Haymarket, 2018), 11–29. 12 Ibid., 11–12. 13 In the United States alone, education has been valued as a $1.5 trillion dollar per year sector ripe for privatization. See Jake Bryant and Jimmy Sarakatsannis, “Why US Education is Ready for Investment,” McKinsey & Company, July 1, 2015, https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/publicand-social-sector/our-insights/why-us-education-is-ready-for-investment. 14 I have written extensively on neoliberal educational restructuring. See, for example, Kenneth J. Saltman, The Failure of Corporate School Reform (New York: Routledge, 2014). 15 Educational finance scholar Bruce Baker contends that the charter municipal bond bubble stands to burst, resulting in a potential trillion dollar debt crisis. See Bruce Baker, “Picture Post Week: Subprime Chartering,” School Finance 101 (blog) (December 10, 2015), https://schoolfinance101. wordpress.com/2015/12/10/picture-post-week-subprime-chartering/. 16 See Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Meijas, The Costs of Connection: How Data is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019). 17 OECD, “Social and Emotional Skills: Well-Being, Connectedness, and Success,” Paris OECD: World Economic Forum, “Schools of the Future: Defining New Models of Education for the Fourth Industrial Revolution January 2020, 1–33, www.weforum.org. 18 Valerie Strauss, “Cuomo Questions Why School Buildings Still Exist—and Says New York Will Work with Bill Gates to ‘Reimagine Education,’” The Washington Post, May 6, 2020. For an excellent early scholarly response to the misuse of the pandemic to advance the commercial agenda in education see Ben Williamson, Rebecca Enyon & John Potter, “Pandemic Politics, Pedagogies, and Practices: Digital Technologies and Distance Education During the Coronavirus Emergency,” Learning, Media, and Technology 45.2 (2020): 107–114. 19 Secretary of Education Betsy Devos directed public education coronavirus relief money to private and religious schools. See Erica L. Green, “DeVos Funnels Coronavirus Relief Funds to Favored Private and Religious Schools,” The New York Times, May 15, 2020. 20 The unbundling agenda of right-wing think tanks is on display for example in Frederick Hess, Bruno Manno, and Olivia Meeks, “From School Choice to Educational Choice,” AEI, April 5, 2011, https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/from-school-choice-to-educational-choice/. 21 Jathan Sadowski, “When Data Is Capital: Datafication, Accumulation, and Extraction,” Big Data and Society (January–June 2019): 1–12. 22 For a review of the linkage of trauma to resilience techniques and neoliberal human capital theory, see for example Paul Tough, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity and the Hidden Power of Character (New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 2012). Angela Duckworth and James Heckman are key academic figures in making these connections. I discussed this specifically with regard to grit pedagogy in Saltman, Scripted Bodies, especially “Chapter Two: The Austerity School: Grit, Character, and the Privatization of Public Education.” 23 Ibid. 24 Heather Roberts-Mahoney, Mark Garrison, and Alexander Means, “Netflixing Human Capital Development: Personalized Learning Technology and the Corporatization of K-12 Education,” JEP 31.4 (2016): 405–20.

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25 Kenneth J. Saltman, The Swindle of Innovative Educational Finance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018). 26 See Saltman, Scripted Bodies, and Williamson and Piattoeva, “Objectivity as Standardization.” 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., “Chapter Two.” 29 Grit chapter from Scripted Bodies. 30 Williamson, Enyon, and Potter, “Pandemic Politics, Pedagogies and Practices.” 31 Ibid., 10. 32 Ibid., 9. 33 Ibid., 11. 34 Ibid., 4. 35 Ibid., 18. 36 OECD and WEF reports. 37 See World Economic Forum, “Schools of the Future,” 11, 13, 26. 38 Williamson, Enyon, and Potter, “Pandemic Politics, Pedagogies, and Practices,” 14; Saltman, Scripted Bodies. 39 See Alysson McDowell’s blog Wrench in the Gears; Williamson, Enyon, and Potter, “Pandemic Politics, Pedagogies, and Practices.” 40 World Economic Forum, “Schools of the Future,” 7. 41 Ibid., 4. 42 Henry Giroux, On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (New York: Bloomsbury, 2020). 43 World Economic Forum, “Schools of the Future,” 10. The perspective of the WEF contrasts with critical pedagogy. See for example, Giroux, On Critical Pedagogy. 44 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 1970); Donaldo Macedo, Literacies of Power (New York: Westview, 2006). 45 World Economic Forum, “Schools of the Future,” 9. 46 Kenneth J. Saltman, The Swindle of Innovative Educational Finance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018). 47 Melissa Sanchez, “Investors Earn Max Initial Payment from Chicago’s Social Impact Bond,” Chicago Reporter, May 16, 2016. 48 See Gary Miron and Jessica Urschel, “A Study of Student Characteristics, School Finance, and School Performance in Schools Operated by K12, Inc.” National Education Policy Center, July 2012, https://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/understanding-improving-virtual. 49 Hess, Manno, and Meeks, “From School Choice to Educational Choice.” 50 Sadowski, “When Datafication Is Capital.” 51 Saltman, Swindle. 52 Faith Boninger, Alex, Molnar, and Christopher Saldana, “Personalized Learning and the Digital Privatization of Curriculum and Teacher,” National Education Policy Center, April 30, 2019, https://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/personalized-learning. 53 https://www.newschools.org/. 54 Kenneth J. Saltman, The Gift of Education: Public Education and Venture Philanthropy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 55 https://www.centervention.com/social-skills-game/. 56 Ibid. 57 Fordham Center on Law and Information Policy, “Transparency and the Marketplace for Student Data,” Fordham University (2018), https://www.fordham.edu/info/23830/research/10517/ transparency_and_the_marketplace_for_student_data/1; Boninger, Molnar, and Saldana, “Personalized Learning.” 58 World Economic Forum, “Schools of the Future,” 8. 59 Ibid., 8.

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60 Saltman, Scripted Bodies. 61 Robinson, Into the Tempest. 62 Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America (Chicago: Haymarket, 2011); Henry Giroux, Theory and Resistance in Education (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1983). 63 Nancy Fraser, “From Discipline to Flexibilization? Rereading Foucault in the Shadow of Globalization,” Constellations 10.2 (2003), 160–71. 64 I take up the critical pedagogical uses of AI Education in Kenneth J. Saltman, “Artificial Intelligence and the Technological Turn of Public Education Privatization: In Defense of Democratic Education,” London Review of Education 18.2 (2020): 196–208.

WORKS CITED Baker, Bruce. “Picture Post Week: Subprime Chartering.” School Finance 101 (blog), December 10, 2015. https://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2015/12/10/picture-post-week-subprimechartering/. Barshay, Jill. “Impact Funds Pour Money Into Ed Tech Businesses.” The Hechinger Report (October 21, 2019). https://hechingerreport.org/impact-funds-pour-money-into-ed-tech-businesses/. Boninger, Faith, Alex Molnar, and Christopher Saldana. “Personalized Learning and the Digital Privatization of Curriculum and Teacher.” National Education Policy Center, April 30, 2019. https://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/personalized-learning. Bowles, Samuel, and Herbert Gintis. Schooling in Capitalist America. Chicago: Haymarket, 2011. Bryant, Jake, and Jimmy Sarakatsannis. “Why US Education is Ready for Investment.” McKinsey & Company, July 1, 2015. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-and-social-sector/our-insights/ why-us-education-is-ready-for-investment. Couldry, Nick, and Ulises A. Meijas. The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019. Fordham Center on Law and Information Policy. “Transparency and the Marketplace for Student Data.” Fordham University, 2018. https://www.fordham.edu/info/23830/research/10517/ transparency_and_the_marketplace_for_student_data/1. Fraser, Nancy. “From Discipline to Flexibilization? Rereading Foucault in the Shadow of Globalization.” Constellations 10.2 (2003): 160–71. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 1970. Giroux, Henry. On Critical Pedagogy. Second Edition. New York: Bloomsbury, 2020. Giroux, Henry. Theory and Resistance in Education. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1983. Green, Erica L. “DeVos Funnels Coronavirus Relief Funds to Favored Private and Religious Schools.” The New York Times, May 15, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/15/us/politics/betsy-devoscoronavirus-religious-schools.html. Hess, Frederick, Bruno Manno, and Olivia Meeks. “From School Choice to Educational Choice.” AEI, April 5, 2011. https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/from-school-choice-to-educationalchoice/. Macedo, Donaldo. Literacies of Power. New York: Westview, 2006. Manolev, Jamie, Anna Sullivan, and Roger Slee. “The Datafication of Discipline: Class Dojo, Surveillance, and a Performative Classroom Culture.” Learning, Media and Technology 44:1 (2019): 36–51. Means, Alexander. Schooling in the Age of Austerity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Miron, Gary, and Jessica Urschel. “A Study of Student Characteristics, School Finance and School Performance in Schools Operated by K12, Inc.” National Education Policy Center, July 2012. https://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/understanding-improving-virtual. OECD. “Social and Emotional Skills: Well-Being, Connectedness, and Success.” Paris OECD: World Economic Forum. “Schools of the Future: Defining New Models of Education for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, January 2020: 1–33. www.weforum.org. Roberts-Mahoney, Heather, Mark Garrison, and Alexander Means. “Netflixing Human Capital Development: Personalized Learning Technology and the Corporatization of K-12 Education.” JEP 31.4 (2016): 405–20.

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Robinson, William I. Into the Tempest. Chicago: Haymarket, 2018. Sadowski, Jathan. “When Data Is Capital: Datafication, Accumulation, and Extraction.” Big Data and Society (January–June 2019): 1–12. Saltman, Kenneth J. “Artificial Intelligence and the Technological Turn of Public Education Privatization: In Defense of Democratic Education.” London Review of Education 18.2 (2020): 196–208. Saltman, Kenneth J. The Failure of Corporate School Reform. New York: Routledge, 2014. Saltman, Kenneth J. The Gift of Education: Public Education and Venture Philanthropy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Saltman, Kenneth J. Scripted Bodies: Corporate Power, Smart Technologies, and the Undoing of Public Education. New York: Routledge, 2016. Saltman, Kenneth J. The Swindle of Innovative Educational Finance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. Saltman, Kenneth J. and Alexander J. Means, eds. The Wiley Handbook of Global Educational Reform. Medford, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2019. Sanchez, Melissa. “Investors Earn Max Initial Payment from Chicago’s Social Impact Bond.” Chicago Reporter, May 16, 2016. https://www.chicagoreporter.com/investors-earn-max-initial-paymentfrom-chicagos-social-impact-bond/. Strauss, Valerie. “Cuomo Questions Why School Buildings Still Exist—and Says New York Will Work with Bill Gates to ‘Reimagine Education.’” The Washington Post, May 6, 2020. https://www. washingtonpost.com/education/2020/05/06/cuomo-questions-why-school-buildings-still-exist-saysnew-york-will-work-with-bill-gates-reimagine-education/. Strauss, Valerie. “Report: Big Education Firms Spend Millions Lobbying for Pro-Testing Policies.” Washington Post, March 30, 2015. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/ wp/2015/03/30/report-big-education-firms-spend-millions-lobbying-for-pro-testing-policies/. Tough, Paul. How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character. New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 2012. Williamson, Ben, and Nelli Piattoeva, “Objectivity as Standardization in Data-Scientific Education Policy, Technology, and Governance.” Learning, Media and Technology 44.1 (2019): 64–76. Williamson, Ben, Rebecca Enyon, and John Potter. “Pandemic Politics, Pedagogies, and Practices: Digital Technologies and Distance Education during the Coronavirus Emergency.” Learning Media and Technology 45.2 (2020): 107–114. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17439884.2 020.1761641. World Economic Forum, “Schools of the Future: Defining New Models of Education for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.” World Economic Forum, January 2020, 1–33. www.weforum.org.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Worlding International Education LIEN PHAM

INTRODUCTION International education (IE) is a broad concept. Fueled by economic, social, and cultural globalization and localization, IE policies and practices are multifaceted and fraught with power relations.1 At the higher-education level, internationalization is driven by economic rationales and dominance of the Western university model, as well as competitiveness and quantitative measures of student and academic mobility, international collaboration, and transnational activities. Governments and university leaders across the world tend to focus on IE policies to realize and increase these quantitative targets rather than initiatives embedded in the local and institutional context for learning. The rise of international schools within the context of internationalization of higher education also accords with market operations and hierarchy of institutions. Best students are attracted to universities with highest reputation that in turn attract best academics because they can pay for them. The international flows of students follow well-defined routes underpinned by linguistic and cultural links of colonialism, or along aid-based relationships between nation-states post Second World War. With some exceptions (e.g., China and Thailand), countries that send international students abroad often are former colonial territories or developing countries that receive developmental aid as part of host countries’ past or present foreign policies.2 At the same time, many former colonial nations and developing countries are also developing their own high-standards universities, taking some market share away from Western universities.3 However, elite schools and universities in the United States, Europe, and the UK remain the “world-class” benchmark, leading to policy borrowing and abandonment of local practices in pursuit of international best practices.4 This tension is exacerbated by administrative and legal mechanisms of borders-crossing (e.g., GATTS, visa, migration) that enhance extant power relations and inequalities across universities and nation-states. IE is a spectrum of disciplinary strategies ranging from more explicit demonstrations of state power such as removing funding to universities to more diffuse soft power exercised by nation-states and institutions, both equally manifested in their location within and premised on the North–South cleavage. The growth of IE as an industry has led to rich and diverse data collected from different sources and methods. However, the practice-oriented concerns of universities and institutions in conducting research or reporting on IE have produced little theorizing of IE, and there has been a lack of attention to examining values and assumptions of knowledge that underpin the unevenness of IE practices that the data highlights; in fact, volumes such as those edited

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by Hans de Wit et al. and Douglas Proctor and Laura Rumbley offer different experiences of internationalization that consider specific regional, national, and/or institutional context.5 However, accounts of “emerging voices” often ignore the dominant assumptions of IE as a neoliberal trajectory that advances Western ideals of knowledge and education as a historically specific set of capital accumulation strategies that defines the “fields” as power struggles between the Global North and Global South (or West and non-West). This taken-for-granted neoliberal underpinning exacerbates the existing structural trends in IE and embeds certain practices at the expense of democratic politics and participation for academics, teachers, and students, who supposedly are the beneficiaries of IE. This chapter is premised on the idea that IE should be a more inclusive world order driven by a common goal of addressing challenges such as climate change and global poverty. Covid-19 has made it clear that reliance on cash flows from international students to generate income for universities is not sustainable, nor is it ethical to use this revenue for purpose of establishing institutional status to attract more students. IE needs to set itself right rather than merely adapting to new circumstances while relying on old economic and political assumptions. IE needs new ways of thinking that inform policy and practices to make it truly belong to the plurality and diversity of the people that it means to serve. The first part of the chapter discusses “fields” of IE as configurations of relations between positions that stem from struggles or tensions of a neoliberal trajectory of IE prevailing in societies of the North and South, notwithstanding their spatial and scalar differences. The North–South cleavage is not a new idea, movement, or process, but a historical, political, cultural, and economic discourse since the conception of IE. IE practice is an assemblage of known vantages from which people experience, address, and deal with everyday situations. From this basis, in the second part of the chapter, I propose “worlding” IE as the world meets the rest, to use Rabindranath Tagore’s idea that IE’s mission is steeped in world culture and civilization consists in ensuring the future of educational needs in a united world.6 “Worlding” is a dialogical model that allows us to learn from each other, share help, and understand who, what, and where we are, and what we want to be and do. Following Walter Mignolo’s decolonial option of delinking from Western starting points with the aim of contribution to building a world in which many worlds exist, “worlding” brings together philosophies of education from both the West and non-West.7 This idea of “worlding” IE is not new either, rather a recognition that different cultural and epistemological traditions of education share the common core values of ethics and formation of the self in relations with others. Seeing IE through a lens different from that afforded by neoliberalism is a prerequisite for rebalancing “fields” of power because it permits people engaging in IE to sense, address, and answer local and global problems by themselves rather than following rules of others.

“FIELDS” OF POWER IE started to be widely discussed from mid-1900s and has evolved significantly with higher stakes overall.8 IE, by definition, provides the sense of world scope and relationships between nations and cultures. As a practice, it is generally understood as both reaction and companion to globalization at the national, institutional, and, to limited extent, individual levels. It also refers to the evolutionary quality of the concept of education toward globalization.9 This is because debates often focus on the driving rationales and implementation strategies of IE that reflect national and cultural norms while assuming the vision and logic of IE as reaching

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a convergence of educational standards with those in Europe and North America. IE is thus discussed in this chapter in terms of boundaries and movements between West and nonWest10 as “fields” of practices, positions, and position-taking in the “fields.”11 IE started in mid-nineteenth century, when state actors in Europe and the United States began to set up international schools mainly in Europe.12 Japan followed in implementing the country’s first IE system as part of the Meiji restoration, after official visits to European capitals and the United States.13 Significant gathering of international educators from many countries followed and led to the rise of international schools across the world at the end of the nineteenth century. The IE movement shifted in the 1920s to forming international organizations for a variety of educational purposes, including international curriculum and exchange of cultural and educational activities (e.g., International Pedagogical Centre in Switzerland, International Confederation of Students in Strasbourg, and Institute of International Education (IIE) in New York).14 The main purpose of IE in this period was to help nation-states develop national identity and serve national needs, with some benefits for individual mobility of a small group of well-resourced and academically well-qualified people to the top learning centers in Europe.15 After the Second World War, state actors continued to be a driving force in IE. Supported by government funding and regulations, national security and foreign policy were the motivation for expanding IE.16 To expand their political and economic power, world powers such as the USSR, the United States, France, and the UK provided development funds for universities in Asia and Latin America. The results were a massive movement of students from former colonies who were ready to learn from their former colonialists, accompanied by reverse flow of academic experts from the latter to teach, train, and develop curriculum in the former. These nation-state relations and people movements create and legitimize the Western framework of IE, underpinning the approach to contemporary internationalization processes as universalizing knowledge rather than contextualizing it.17 The universalization of Western knowledge becomes the normative idea of university everywhere and the dichotomy organizing the curriculum and pedagogy distinctions between the West and non-West. In this postwar period, UNESCO had a significant role in affirming Western learnercentered approaches and English-language instruction as international best practice of classroom teaching, through national-level and sector-level aid.18 UNESCO established IE as intercultural education to promote cooperation, peace, human rights, fundamental freedoms, and democracy. 19 Global citizenship, intra-state multiculturalism, individual development, and intercultural competencies for professional tasks in an increasingly globalized world were also put forward as the purpose for IE. This view aligned with the opening up of developing countries to global trade,20 which suited the political elites in the United States and its Washington Consensus agenda, which promoted IE at the state level as human resources development, strategic alliances, income generation through commercial trade, nation and institution building, social and cultural development, and mutual understanding.21 The period from the 1980s through to the 1990s saw IE worldwide formulated as a process of strategic transformation at the university level rather than national level.22 This began with the European Commission’s pilot of the European Region Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students (ERASMUS), followed by the Bologna Reform Process; both significantly changed the international relations of higher education in Europe.23 IE shifted toward making university systems and structures transparent to allow for student mobility and for European universities to be competitive in their programs offering. Although operating at the institutional level, the policy contexts of these large-scale IE developments

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reflected the European Commission’s mission to firmly constitute and reconstitute higher education as a European policy domain.24 Although the diversity of IE offerings by universities suggests inconsistency in the overall European strategy, it does show the historical trajectory of political developments that surround the nature and future of IE in Europe and manifest in other parts of the world that enhance and reinforce the legitimacy of Western knowledge and consolidate pre-existing IE framework. The strengthening of the European community in IE at this time led some European nations and universities to change their benevolent laissez-faire policy to more controlled acceptance and in some cases active recruitment of fee-paying foreign students. By the end of the twentieth century, higher education became a significant export commodity all over Europe, the UK, and Australia at the national and institutional levels. The economic rationale for IE was clear, with competition being a key feature in addition to national security and foreign policy.25 Rankings became the incentive for universities to compete in IE for international branding and profile, quality enhancement, international standards, alternative income generation, student and staff development, networks and strategic alliances, and knowledge production.26 Knowledge—the kind associated with Western culture and education—is seen as a commodity to be bought and sold in the “knowledge economy.” Internationalization has thus become business strategies of universities in the North, which have increased in scope and size alongside emerging economies that through membership in the WTO and commitment to GATS open their doors to transnational activities. Ideas are flowing from the North to the South, whether it is people from the South coming to the North for study or so-called experts from the North sent to the South to implement Western forms of internationalization.27 The global “field” is uneven, with well-resourced universities and students having more options and opportunities in the modes and extent of internationalization and gaining access to international experiences.28 If international opportunities are unevenly distributed, so too are effects at the individual and state levels. IE leads to brain drain for some developing countries and escalating advantage of other developed countries. Poorer countries, particularly given the emerging regulatory frameworks, can find it increasingly difficult to protect the public from low-quality educational programming offered by some foreign providers, although this also occurs in rich countries like Australia. On the other hand, all forms of capital (cultural capital, social capital, symbolic capital) are associated with IE to elevate international graduates as a more distinguished labor force or “talent” in emerging economies when they return home.29 In the local and global market of IE, stakeholders are seen as part of the capitalist system and values locked in a dialectical unity. They are not opposites to each other but operating as unit in flows of trade, ideas, money, and labor. Although there is differentiation of IE within the North and South, IE is still dominated by the North and reinforces the center-periphery (North–South) power relations.30 Yet research has focused on pragmatist concerns of student mobility metrics, growth, and productivity of internationalization, with little attempt to make sense of developing capitalist relations that drive international outbound or inbound traffic of academics and students. The global discourse of “knowledge economy” attaches the same economic imperatives for schools to the idea of preparing students for the requirements of a globally networked labor market.31 International secondary schools are deeply conscious of the highly competitive educational market in which they operate. They, too, adopt internationalization strategy to improve income and retain prestige that is centuries old.32 They recruit students from

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the growing wealthy class in developing countries to take on travel-abroad programs, study tours, and educational exchange, to experience cultural diversity and develop skills of intercultural communication, global leadership, and global networking.33 Although they differ markedly in their curricular and pedagogic approaches, international school programs such as International Baccalaureate and CIS share a common ideological position of developing students’ cosmopolitan outlook.34 Such experiences have become the vehicle for students in international schools to acquire and deploy cultural and social capital in order to gain entry to prestigious universities in the North. These forms of capital constitute aspirations for higher education abroad that perpetuate social differentiation between those schools whose students routinely aspire to IE and those who do not.35 In the global market of international schools, the logic of internationalization in higher education is inextricably linked to international schools in forging and perpetuating the unidirectional flow that reflects power relations and Western dominance. At the same time, the governance imperative of IE is manifested through the OECD’s production of large-scale international tests of secondary school students (e.g., PISA, TIMMS, PIRLS) and ranking of “successful” education systems. National education reforms are carried out in responses to PISA results as countries participate in international competition. Echoing the OECD’s economic-centered view of education, the European Commission (2018) contends that more focused policy work on improving PISA scores for fifteen-yearolds will later improve the skills of the future EU workforce, and this adult skills “boost” will eventually lead to greater economic growth. Julia Resnik36 has argued that, from a human capital perspective, economic usability of education is largely borrowed from the AngloAmerican neoliberalism of Reagan and Thatcher in the 1980s and has become the cornerstone of the OECD education framework.37 The OECD’s understanding of education outcomes is closely coupled with the utility of generated knowledge echoed by other international organizations like the World Bank.38 Knowledge has value depending on its utility for other areas (e.g., applied research, technology progress), and thus underscores the idea of developing students to match behavioral profiles of corporate “talent” in multinational corporations.39 International tests underline the Western consensus of coupling education and economic development, which is embedded deeply into policymaking goals through the OECD’s production of these tests. Yet the results of PISA also reveal that students in Asian countries are doing better than their Western counterparts. Success in PISA does not mean, however, that students are more likely to conform to behavioral profiles of corporate “talent” in multinational corporations, particularly those operating in Asian Tiger economies, for example, Singapore. This interesting paradox still does not negate the influential role of the OECD as international governance body and legitimate source of guiding countries’ policy objectives,40 promoting neoliberal recommendations for reform. In fact, this narrative of education and economics is accelerating worldwide as PISA is now anchored in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The North–South difference is a historical condition that creates “fields” of power in internationalization activities and contributes to the neoliberal growth of IE. Privileging a form of knowledge originating from the North and flowing to the South enables dominant values and interests to continue to be legitimated. The exclusionary process inherent in the competitive global environment of IE generates and disseminates knowledge in unbalanced and unreciprocated partnerships between host and home countries and institutions. It is common for institutions in more developed countries to impose their own scope, standards,

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and protocols in partnerships, leaving “lower-status” institutions with limited room for maneuvering.41 Asymmetries of internationalization and student mobility are only fragments of the IE story. Extrapolating neoliberalism as the global diffusion of “knowledge economy” based on globalization that favors capitalist expansion of the West significantly reduces the analytical value of these accounts of IE in contexts where the building blocks of Western postwar development have been historically weak or nonexistent.42 The idea of “knowledge economy” as constituting a demand for IE has a further disempowering effect at the national level as  universities in former colonial states strive to borrow policies from the EuroAmerican nations. Countries, including those with noncolonial heritage such as Japan, China, and Thailand, strive toward creating a model of world-class university with Western values and standards. “World-class” discourse, accelerated by university league tables, provides a rationalized “template of excellence” that legitimizes IE as a neoliberal project, which assumes that competition drives institutions toward greater levels of efficiency and higher ranking.43 The lack of public funding to education in host and home countries makes the importexport of IE appear necessary. In these ways, the rise of IE is linked to the international problems encountered by different states and institutions as a result of their participation in an interdependent global economy. The landscape of global IE has seen new institutional actors from different parts of the world. Many countries in Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, MENA, and Africa work to position themselves as regional alliances.44 These movements may follow economic development and a neoliberal trajectory in the epoch of globalization; however, they do not always exhibit characteristics symptomatic of the neoliberal argument offered in the West, nor do they always highlight the academic imperialism and heteronomy of the “fields.” Many emerging economies in Asia want to raise the profile of their cultural heritage on the global stage and tend to emphasize institutional identities with nationalist ideologies rather than institutional ranking positing graduates as the future of global labor markets.45 For example, China has offered free classes in different parts of the world to teach Mandarin or Chinese languages to anyone who wants them, especially if they are planning business opportunities in the country. Yet, these accounts hit a significant barrier when they attempt to explain localized instances of internationalization or when they retrace the connections between neoliberal ideas and Western policies that are supposedly designed to realize such theoretical claims. Although there is some recognition of different contexts of developmental states when engaging in IE, such accounts often ignore the postcolonial conditions upon which IE practices rest. In other words, the intertwined globalization, Westernization, and political economy of IE are acknowledged but seldom theorized, which diverts attention from the conditions and conditionings of neoliberal IE that preserve the hierarchy of institutions within North–South binaries. There is a critical need for alternative concepts of IE that do not assume an automatic translation of neoliberalism into policy and priorities. We must recognize and explain the globalized but unbalanced manifestation of IE by taking into account local trajectories of IE alongside national, institutional, and human development. There is indeed no shortage of critical voices calling for IE to make room for new perspectives from the less dominant systems or institutions. However, global dialogues seem to remain distant from framing IE in ways that include non-English and non-Western thinking. What we need is a dialogical model of IE that embeds in specific contexts and culture the common values of ethics and reciprocity of respect for our interdependence in the world.

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“WORLDING” AS A DIALOGICAL MODEL I offer the concept of “worlding” IE as a dialogical model of power relations globally and locally, connecting humans with each other to learn and share different ideas rather than privileging certain ideas or merging all ideas into one. “Worlding” is defined here as the world meets the rest—acknowledging that all countries, economies, universities, and communities encounter similar opportunities and crises in an interdependent world. Knowledge production and consumption do not have to be crafted by states, multilateral institutions, and universities in the Global North. “Worlding” does not downplay the uneven “fields” of power and the constitutive role of institutional, state, or multilateral actors in imposing neoliberal reforms and governance in the North and South. It does, however, aim to rebalance the power effects of such institutions and states by recognizing the role of local state and institutional strategies and of socioeconomic and cultural conditions in shaping the trajectories of people’s subjectivities within IE, much as it also seeks to define possibilities for transformation and change. “Worlding” IE recognizes important linkages between the North and the South and its actors; thus, it seeks to examine their evolving characters in appropriate spheres of knowledge production and reproduction rather than assuming or leveraging North–South cleavage for IE effects. Knowledge derived from “worlding” IE does not essentialize a place or space, rather searching for truth and relations of one to the other and engendering critical thoughts and activism by people for the world and in the world they live in. IE for “worlding” would need to be situated in spaces that intersect different worlds as points of interchange, connecting different worlds into co-presence with each other. Donna Haraway explains that such interchange points or contact points are ways of thinking and being that truly come from different kinds of experiences of living.46 It is about exploring how education is reconfigured to anticipate a world where many worlds coexist, and where there are connections to and within these multiple worlds. Borders that separate nations geographically and culturally can be spaces where new meanings, symbols, concepts, and tactical identifications are generated to destabilize and erode established and fixed cultural, disciplinary, and epistemic modes, be they Western or non-Western. IE as “worlding” is about learning to encounter with each other rather than transferring knowledge from one to another based on some defined notions that differentiate, rank, and marginalize. This implies people capable of encountering each other and become who and what they are in relationships of interdependence and interrelatedness that make everyone part of the world community. These ideas are not new, nor are they specific to particular systems of knowledge. They cut across disciplinary areas in decolonial feminist studies or indigenous studies but also in the education philosophy of Japanese Buddhism and Confucianism and in classic texts of Socrates, Dewey, and others. The process of IE underpinned by neoliberalism is a version of the liberal tradition that conflates the idea of rationality and autonomy of modern self with improved employability discourses that instrumental culture has set us up. John Dewey, drawing on liberalism, eloquently defended “radical” democracy as antidote to laissez-faire modern economics.47 For Dewey, the clear consciousness of a communal life, in all its implications, constitutes the idea of democracy. Dewey has shown that democracy does not deal with finished agents; rather, human beings are constantly in the process of formation (Bildung).48 In the same liberalist lens, Amartya Sen sees education as expansion of capabilities or freedom to choose valued ways of life.49 Education would form people’s capabilities, and universities would contribute individually and systematically to empowerment, equalities, security, and well-being of

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humans and societies. Sen’s notion of freedom focuses on the substantive opportunities that people can access and acknowledges the links between people’s freedom to choose and their position and interpersonal variation within the nature and operation of the market.50 This allows education to be thought of beyond the utilitarian framework of IE that promotes the instrumental value of individual freedom. Furthermore, different people, even if they possess equal amounts of academic capital, can command different conceptions of good life. Therefore, academic qualifications, if viewed as commodities or income, are unreliable if they are used to assess people’s actual freedom to lead one kind of life, as opposed to another. It cannot be denied that freedom has instrumental importance. For example, a university degree with some level of skills acquisition will allow us to be free to choose a variety of jobs, no matter what the job options are. But if we view freedom in terms of actual ability to achieve valuable doings and beings, then we have to go beyond the instrumental values of commodities or income.51 The problem of thinking purely in terms of economic rationality is that it leads to a confinement of assumptions and outcomes of education to only economic notions and fails to account for the diverse functions that people may have in real life and in seeking education.52 Therefore, education ought to be considered for its intrinsic value, not just for its instrumental means. The intrinsic value is the attention of education to educators and students’ commitment to their own values and goals and how education may transform a people’s freedom to make decisions that they value rather than commanding them to have certain desires and values.53 The malaise of pursuit of self-interest at the cost of shared ethical commitments to the public good is also underscored by the writings of Gandhi. In the book Hind Swaraj Indian Home Rule, Gandhi pointed out that egocentrism or individual self-seeking is contrary to ethical and spiritual “rightness.”54 His idea of self-rule is similar to Sen’s concept of freedom in promoting one’s self, which does not entail selfish rule or promotion of self-centered ambitions. It is aligned with Dewey’s radical democracy in emphasizing the ability to rein in such ambitions for benefits of the common good. Gandhi pointed out that education could lead us to different roads converging on the same point of putting human beings on the path of social engagement and responsibility. For Gandhi, to attain mastery over our mind and passions is to rule ourselves as individuals and as people rather than be ruled by others—what he calls “democracy.” This is also the premise of Sen’s advocacy for “reasoned values” as a characteristic of capability. Self-rule or human flourishing cannot be simply the enlargement of power, or managerial control, or resources to do that. Rather, to be ethically tenable and sustainable, democratic self-rule has to involve a practice of self-restraint and selftransformation that instills generous openness toward others. Gandhi’s concept of democracy bearing on ethics and recognizing the person’s interconnectedness with the collective as mutually assisting forces seems to be the radical democracy that Dewey refers to. Dewey does not assume that humans are equal and free by nature, but rather that freedom and equality are achievements that require steady practice that involves self-transformation. Dewey’s liberalism was against the version of liberalism that imprisons individuals in their own ego.55 Individuality for Dewey identifies how someone participates in communal life and recognizes the “irreducibility of community and multiple perspectives associated with it” as constitutive of democratic life.56 Applying these views, the supreme test of IE and institutions offering IE shall be the contribution IE makes to the allround growth or flourishing of every member of society. Underpinning Dewey’s, Sen’s, and Gandhi’s concepts of social “relationism” and selfformation for the public good is the Confucian premise of human relationships in education.57

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The Confucian way is akin to Gandhi’s Indian swaraj that involves an unceasing process of self-transformation as a communal act and thus a linkage of ethics and social engagement whose reasoning effect can ultimately free the person from constrictions of the privatized ego. Human freedom, from this angle, is limited or circumscribed not by the state or external procedures but by the ability of ethical transformation, that is, by the ability of people to rule themselves rather than by others. Confucius’s philosophical affinity with Dewey is clear in that Confucius sees conquering the self as humaneness (ke-chi)58 to be closely linked with the concept of self-cultivation or self-transformation and hence with the task of responsible and responsive social agency. The idea of education for ethical life also underpins Socrates’s ideals of learning. Socratic being-educated is a practice where the self in connection with others finds an ethical awareness.59 It aligns with Sen’s ideas of reasoned values inextricably linked with living a life of excellence or flourishing life. Socratic learning is the process through which the soul turns back to itself enlightened, which is made possible by the practice of dialectical inquiry rather than by acquiring fixed knowledge.60 Socratic learning is often associated with modern pedagogy that involves questions and reasoning. Unfortunately, it is also taken for granted as Western humanist education rather than as attuning to what is owned or shared, which occurs and holds the potential to ethically transform the character or disposition of participants in education within the dialectic of their world. Socrates’s idea of the human as a subject-in-transition emphasizes, as with Confucian selfcultivation, the deepening of one’s awareness as one lives with one’s networks of relations. Both Socrates and Confucius underscore education as living ethical roles and being responsive members of family and community. As in Sen, education moves beyond developing cognitive and rational capabilities for instrumental purpose and values the cultivation of sensitivity to and appreciation of living-in-this-world. Socrates’s interest in furthering an ethical disposition displays the educative search for possible moral growth and advancement of the individual. It is exemplified in praxis within the ethics of the community of others, as with the educational philosophies of Dewey, Gandhi, Sen, and Confucius. This sketch of educational philosophies is too brief to elucidate their complexity. It is impossible to do so in the scope of this chapter. The intention here is to point out the common idea of education among traditions of the East and the West as a perpetual process that cultivates the “self” as an ethical disposition. Being educated is a development of the self that has concern for others, where choice and agency are about one’s own behavior with immediate and direct concern for others’ welfare. Education is both transformative and formative for the person when the process encourages self-formation and participation that contributes in an essential way to the transformation and formation occurring. Taking existing educational traditions that underpin global society and civilization as dialogues, “worlding” IE threads their shared values to suggest a larger system of meanings and values, which could be experienced in IE. This “worlding” IE experience impels self-cultivation behaviors, attitudes, and values in the encounters with others—when the world meets the rest. As Boyd Roberts (2015) has argued, equipping students to live equitably and ethically seems at least as important as giving them skills and knowledge to earn a living.61 In the globalized world, IE is about sharing knowledge about cultures and societies, which can lead to a sensibility and ability to view things from another perspective, willingness to give voice to others, respect, and listening to others. Economic drivers of IE must make room for societal interests that awake consciousness and responsibility for the local and global. It is this ethical intention that can truly connect IE to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.

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CONCLUSION A “worlding” theory cannot subsume local interventions under a totalizing theory but offers ways to analyze specificities of power within the local that locate and extend their connections to the global as an assemblage of knowledge available for social actors to appropriate for varying purposes as they see valuable. In this chapter, I suggest “worlding” IE as a reorientation toward commonalities between states, universities, and I propose that power relations across and within these entities move from a position of dividing practices that entrench North– South divide to mobilization strategies and policies to counteract actors and processes that engender neoliberal IE symptoms. This concept of “worlding” is inherently challenging in the heteronomy of “fields” of IE steeped in a dichotomy of West and non-West systems of knowledge. Any attempt of theorizing beyond the Western horizon of knowledge production needs to be accompanied by an empirical project. This seems difficult when research focuses on pragmatic concerns of universities offering IE that legitimates neoliberalism and props up the very existence of scholars and professionals whose livelihood depends on taken-for-granted views of Western dominance. At the same time, regional alliances of internationalization and development of “world-class” institutions in Asia, Latin America, and Africa create dynamics of North-inSouth and South-in-North that could be said to affect existing hierarchy. The challenge is to not see these emergences as changing the “game” with new winners and losers but rather as a catalysts for moving toward autonomy in “fields” attuned to social responsibility and global citizenship. As Michael C. McCarthy has noted: As the future of higher education remains so uncertain, and as the financial pressures of running universities increase, I find great courage in those schools that strive to be driven by something more than the market economy.62 “Worlding” IE would reinforce the idea of the “glocal” university as an “inescapable social force for good,” making IE engagement compatible with the immediate needs of local societies.63 This worlding is about finding ethics in all our differences and similarities and about learning to self-rule rather than impose or follow. IE is “worlding” when we look deeply below the surface of behaviors, processes, indicators, or drivers of IE merely as a process or practices of border-crossing. This chapter’s cursory examination of the philosophical underpinnings of education across traditions unveils common values that suggest possibilities of promoting voices of the world and for the world. “Worlding” is about understanding IE as a dialogical model of social relations that people are subjected to and that constitute their epistemic identities. These relations need to be understood rather than exploited so people in all their plurality could be viewed and could participate in IE on their terms and for their benefits.

NOTES 1 Fazal Rizvi, “Epistemic Virtues and Cosmopolitan Learning.” Australian Educational Researcher 35.1 (2008): 17–35. 2 Lien Pham, International Students Returning to Vietnam: Experiences of the Local Economies, Universities and Communities. (Singapore: Springer, 2019), 20–5. 3 Hans De Wit, Jocelyn Gacel-Avila, and Elspeth Jones, “Voices and Perspectives on Internationalization from the Emerging and Developing world: Where are We Heading?” in The Globalization of

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Internationalisation. Emerging Voices and Perspectives, eds. Hans De Wit, Jocelyn Gacel-Avila, Elspeth Jones and Nico Jooste (London: Routledge, 2017), 221–33. 4 Moonsung Lee and Wright Ewan Wright, “Elite Schools in International Education Markets in East Asia,” in The Sage Handbook of Research in International Education, eds. Mary Hayden, Jack Levy, and Jeff Thomson (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2015), 583–97. 5 Bryan McAllister-Grande, “Toward Humanistic Internationalization: Does the Current Western Theory of Internationalization Have Protestant Roots?” in The Future Agenda for Internationalization in Higher Education: Next Generation Insights into Research, Policy, and Practice, eds. Douglas Proctor and Laura E. Rumbley (New York: Routledge, 2018), 124. 6 Robert Sylvester, “Historical Resources for Research in International Education (1851–1950),” in The Sage Handbook of Research in International Education, eds. Mary Hayden, Jack Levey, and Jeff Thomson (London: SAGE, 2015), 16. 7 Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 108. 8 Sylvester, “Historical Resources,” 13. 9 Jaishree K. Odin and Peter T. Mancias, eds., Globalization and Higher Education (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004), 3–5. 10 “West” and “non-West” are used interchangeably with “North” and “South” in this chapter. The latter refers to political and economic aspects in international development, while the former is often used in the context of education policies and practices. 11 Pierre Bourdieu, “The Social Space and the Genesis of Groups,” Theory and Society 14 (1985): 723–44. 12 Sylvester, “Historical Resources,” 14. 13 David N. Wilson, “Comparative and International Education: Fraternal or Siamese Twins? A Preliminary Genealogy of Our Twin Fields,” Comparative Education Review 38.4 (1994): 449–86. 14 William W. Brickman, “International Education,” in Encyclopedia of Educational Research, ed. Walter S. Monroe (New York: Macmillan, 1950), 617–27. 15 Hans De Wit and Gilbert Merkx, “The History of Internationalization of Higher Education,” in The Sage Handbook of International Higher Education, eds. Darla Deardorf, Hans De Wit, John D. Heyl, and Tony Adams (London: SAGE, 2012), 47. 16 Pham, International Students Returning to Vietnam, 20–1. 17 McAllister-Grande, “Toward Humanistic Internationalization,” 123–27. 18 Kenneth King, “The History and Future of International Cooperation in Education,” in Routledge Handbook of International Education and Development, eds. Simon McGrath and Qing Gu (London: Routledge, 2016), 376. 19 UNESCO, “Recommendation for International Understanding Cooperation and Peace and Education Relating to Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms,” UNESCO (1974), http://portal. unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=13088andURL_DO=DO_TOPICandURL_SECTION=201.html; UNESCO, “Declaration of an Integrated Framework of Action on Education for Peace, Human Rights and Democracy,” UNESCO (1995), https://www.peace-ed-campaign.org/declarationintegrated-framework-action-education-peace-human-rights-democracy/. 20 Hugh Lauder and Phillip Brown, “Economic Globalisation, Skill formation and Development,” in Routledge Handbook of International Education and Development, eds. Simon McGrath and Qing Gu (London: Routledge, 2016), 303–07. 21 Jane Knight, “Internationalisation: Concepts, Complexities and Challenges,” in International Handbook of Higher Education, eds. James J. F. Forest and Phillip G. Altbach (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), 207–27. 22 Hilary Callan, “The International Vision in Practice: A Decade of Evolution,” Higher Education in Europe 25.1 (2000): 15–23. 23 Pham, International Students Returning to Vietnam, 21–2.

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24 Ruth Keeling, “The Bologna Process and the Lisbon Research Agenda: the European Commission’s Expanding Role in Higher Education Discourse,” European Journal of Higher Education 41.2 (2006): 203–23. 25 Martin Shaw, Global Society and International Relations: Sociological Theory and Political Perspectives (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), 5. 26 Knight, “Internationalisation,” 207–27. 27 Laura Rumbley, Phillip Altbach, and Liz Reisberg, “Internationalization with the Higher Education Context,” in The Sage Handbook of International Higher Education, eds. Darla K. Deardorf, Hans De Wit, John D. Heyl, and Tony Adams (London: SAGE, 2012), 10. 28 Phillip Altbach, Liz Reisberg, and Laura Rumbley, “Trends in Global Higher Education: Tracking an Academic Revolution,” A Report Prepared for the UNESCO 2009 World Conference on Higher Education, UNESCO (2009), https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000183168. 29 Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Education, Globalisation and Social Change, eds. Hugh Lauder, Phillip Brown, Jo-Anne Dillabough, and A. H. Halsey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 105–18. 30 Altbach, Reisberg, and Rumbley, “Trends in Global Higher Education,” n.p. 31 Fazal Rizvi and Bob Lingard, Globalizing Education Policy (London: Routledge, 2010), preface. 32 Adinda Van Gaalen and Susanne Feiertag, “Is There a Gap to Bridge between Internationalization in Secondary and Higher Education?” in The Future Agenda for Internationalization in Higher Education: Next Generation Insights into Research, Policy, and Practice, eds. Douglas Proctor and Laura E. Rumbley (New York: Routledge, 2018), 199–211. 33 Fazal Rizvi, “School Internationalization and Its Implications for Higher Education,” in The Globalization of Internationalisation: Emerging Voices and Perspectives, eds. Hans De Wit, Jocely Gacel-Avila, Elspeth Jones, and Nico Jooste (London: Routledge, 2017), 18–36. 34 Ibid. 35 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 78–87. 36 Julia Resnik, “International Organizations, the ‘Education–Economic Growth’ Black Box, and the Development of World Education Culture,” Comparative Education Review 50.2 (2006): 173–95. 37 Eric Hanushek, “Throwing Money at Schools,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 1.1 (1981): 19–41; Eric Hanushek, “The Economics of Schooling: Production and Efficiency in Public Schools,” Journal of Economic Literature 24.3 (1986): 1141–77. 38 Euan Auld, Jeremy Rappleye, and Paul Morris, “Framing the Future: PISA for Development and the Future of Education Governance,” The NORRAG (December 11, 2018), https://www.norrag.org/ framing-the-future-pisa-for-development-and-the-future-of-education-governance-by-euan-auldjeremy-rappleye-paul-morris/. 39 Eric Mangez and Mathieu Hilgers, “The Field of Knowledge and the Policy Field in Education: PISA and the Production of Knowledge for Policy,” European Educational Research Journal 11.2 (2012): 189–205. 40 Dennis Niemann and Kerstin Martens, “Monitoring Standards of Education Worldwide: Pisa and Its Consequences,” in The Sage Handbook of Research in International Education, eds. Mary Hayden, Jack Levey, and Jeff Thomson (London: SAGE, 2015), 488–89. 41 Eva Egron-Polak and Francisco Marmolejo, “Higher Education Internationalization: Adjusting to New Landscapes,” in The Globalization of Internationalisation: Emerging Voices and Perspectives, eds. Hans De Wit, Jocely Gacel-Avila, Elspeth Jones, and Nico Jooste (London: Routledge, 2017), 12. 42 Cemal B. Tansel, “Authoritarian Neoliberalism: Towards a New Research Agenda,” in States of Discipline: Authoritarian Neoliberalism and the Contested Reproduction of Capitalist Order, ed. Cemal Burak Tansel (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017), 1–13. 43 Jamie Peck, Nik Theodore, and Neil Brenner, “Postneoliberalism and Its Malcontents,” Antipode 41 (2010): 94–116.

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44 de Wit, Gacel-Avila, and Jones, “Voices and Perspectives,” 221–33. 45 Joseph S. Nye, “The Rise of China’s Soft Power,” Wall Street Journal Asia (December 29, 2005), https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB113580867242333272. 46 Donna Haraway, “Statements on ‘Decolonizing Time,’” Time Issues, 2017, https://time-issues.org/ haraway-statements-on-decolonizing-time/. 47 Richard Bernstein, “Dewey’s Vision of Radical Democracy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Dewey, ed. Molly Cochran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 288–308. 48 Ibid. 49 Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 8–9. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid. 52 Elaine Unterhalter, “What Is Equity in Education? Reflections from the Capability Approach,” Studies in Philosophy and Education 28.5 (2009): 415–24. 53 Sen, Development as Freedom, 11. 54 M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1909), https://www.mkgandhi.org/ebks/hind_swaraj.pdf. 55 Matthew Festenstein, “Dewey’s Political Philosophy,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Winter 2019 edition), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2019/entries/ dewey-political/. 56 Fred Dallmayr, The Promise of Democracy: Political Agency and Transformation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 184. 57 Tu Wei-ming, Bingyi Yu, and Zhaolu Lu, “Confucianism and Modernity: Insights from an Interview with Tu Wei-ming,” China Review International 7.2 (2000): 377–87. 58 You Yun, “Learning Experience: An Alternative Understanding Inspired by Thinking through Confucius,” ECNU Review of Education 3.1 (2020): 66–87. 59 George Lazaroiu, “The Socratic Process of Learning: Being Educated as a Philosophical Way of Ethical Life,” Review of Contemporary Philosophy 17 (2018): 114–20. 60 Ibid. 61 Boyd Roberts, “Education for a Different World: How International Education Responds to Change,” in The Sage Handbook of Research in International Education, eds. Mary Hayden, Jack Levey, and Jeff Thomson (London: SAGE, 2015), 101–2. 62 Michael C. McCarthy, “A Jesuit inspiration,” New York Times, November 14, 2014, https://www. nytimes.com/2014/11/15/opinion/a-jesuit-inspiration.html. 63 Francesc Xavier Grau, John Goddard, Ellen Hazelkorn, and Rajesh Tandon, eds., Higher Education in the World 6. Towards a Socially Responsible Higher Education Institution: Balancing the Global with the Local, Global University Network for Innovation (GUNi), 2017, http://www.guninetwork. org/report/higher-education-world-6, 32.

WORKS CITED Auld, Euan, Jeremy Rappleye, and Paul Morris. “Framing the Future: PISA for Development and the Future of Education Governance.” The NORRAG, December 11, 2018. https://www.norrag.org/ framing-the-future-pisa-for-development-and-the-future-of-education-governance-by-euan-auldjeremy-rappleye-paul-morris/. Altbach, Phillip, Liz Reisberg, and Laura Rumbley. “Trends in Global Higher Education: Tracking an Academic Revolution.” A Report Prepared for the UNESCO 2009 World Conference on Higher Education. UNESCO, 2009. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000183168. Bernstein, Richard. “Dewey’s Vision of Radical Democracy.” In The Cambridge Companion to Dewey. Ed. Molly Cochran. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, 288–308. Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Forms of Capital.” In Education, Globalisation and Social Change. Eds. Hugh Lauder, Phillip Brown, Jo-Anne Dillabough and A. H. Halsey. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. 105–18.

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Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Social Space and the Genesis of Groups.” Theory and Society 14 (1985): 723–44. Brickman, William W. “International Education.” In Encyclopedia of Educational Research. Ed. Walter S. Monroe. New York: Macmillan, 1950. 617–27. Callan, Hilary. “The International Vision in Practice: A Decade of Evolution.” Higher Education in Europe 25.1 (2000): 15–23. Dallmayr, Fred. The Promise of Democracy: Political Agency and Transformation. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010. De Wit, Hans, and Gilbert Merkx. “The History of Internationalization of Higher Education.” In The Sage Handbook of International Higher Education. Eds. Darla Deardorf, Hans de Wit, John D. Heyl, and Tony Adams. London: SAGE, 2012. 43–60. De Wit, Hans, J. Gacel-Avila, Elspeth Jones, and Nico Jooste, eds. The Globalization of Internationalisation: Emerging Voices and Perspectives. London: Routledge, 2017. de Wit, Hans, Jocelyn Gacel-Avila, and Elspeth Jones. “Voices and Perspectives on Internationalization from the Merging and Developing World: Where Are We Heading?” In The Globalization of Internationalisation: Emerging Voices and Perspectives. Eds. Hans De Wit, Jocelyn Gacel-Avila, Elspeth Jones, and Nico Jooste. London: Routledge, 2017. 221–33. Egron-Polak, Eva, and Francisco Marmolejo. “Higher Education Internationalization: Adjusting to New Landscapes.” In The Globalization of Internationalisation: Emerging Voices and Perspectives. Eds. Hans De Wit, Jocely Gacel-Avila, Elspeth Jones and Nico Jooste. London: Routledge, 2017. 7–17. Festenstein, Matthew. “Dewey’s Political Philosophy.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ed. Edward N. Zalta. (Winter 2019 Edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2019/entries/ dewey-political/. Gandhi, M. K. Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1909. https://www.mkgandhi.org/ebks/hind_swaraj.pdf. Grau, Francesc Xavier, John Goddard, Ellen Hazelkorn, and Rajesh Tandon. Higher Education in the World 6. Towards a Socially Responsible Higher Education Institution: Balancing the Global with the Local. Global University Network for Innovation (GUNi), 2017. http://www.guninetwork.org/ report/higher-education-world-6. Hanushek, Eric. “The Economics of Schooling: Production and Efficiency in Public Schools.” Journal of Economic Literature 24.3 (1986): 1141–77. Hanushek, Eric. “Throwing Money at Schools.” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 1.1 (1981): 19–41. Haraway, Donna. “Statements on ‘Decolonizing Time.’” Time Issues, 2017. https://time-issues.org/ haraway-statements-on-decolonizing-time/. International Association of Universities. “Affirming Academic Values in Internationalization of Higher Education: A Call for Action.” IAU 2012. https://iau-aiu.net/IMG/pdf/affirming_academic_ values_in_internationalization_of_higher_education.pdf. Keeling, Ruth. “The Bologna Process and the Lisbon Research Agenda: The European Commission’s Expanding Role in Higher Education Discourse.” European Journal of Higher Education 41.2 (2006): 203–23. King, Kenneth. “The History and Future of International Cooperation in Education.” In Routledge Handbook of International Education and Development. Eds. Simon McGrath and Qing Gu. London: Routledge, 2016, 375–89. Knight, Jane. “Internationalisation: Concepts, Complexities and Challenges.” In International Handbook of Higher Education. Eds. James J. F. Forest and Phillip G. Altbach. Dordrecht: Springer, 2006. 207–27. Lauder, Hugh, and Phillip Brown. “Economic Globalisation, Skill Formation and Development.” In Routledge Handbook of International Education and Development. Eds. Simon McGrath and Qing Gu. London: Routledge, 2016. 303–21. Lazaroiu, George. “The Socratic Process of Learning: Being Educated as a Philosophical Way of Ethical Life.” Review of Contemporary Philosophy 17 (2018): 114–20.

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Lee, Moonsung, and Ewan Wright. “Elite Schools in International Education Markets in East Asia.” In The Sage Handbook of Research in International Education. Eds. Mary Hayden, Jack Levy, and Jeff Thomson. Los Angeles: SAGE, 2015. 583–97. Mangez, Eric, and Mathieu Hilgers. “The Field of Knowledge and the Policy Field in Education: PISA and the Production of Knowledge for Policy.” European Educational Research Journal 11.2 (2012): 189–205. McAllister-Grande, Bryan. “Toward Humanistic Internationalization: Does the Current Western Theory of Internationalization have Protestant Roots?” In The Future Agenda for Internationalization in Higher Education: Next Generation Insights into Research, Policy and Practice. Eds. Douglas Proctor and Laura E. Rumbley. New York: Routledge, 2018. 123–32. McCarthy, Michael C. “A Jesuit Inspiration.” New York Times, November 14, 2014. https://www. nytimes.com/2014/11/15/opinion/a-jesuit-inspiration.html. Mignolo, Walter D., and Catherine E. Walsh. On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Niemann, Dennis, and Kerstin Martens. “Monitoring Standards of Education Worldwide: Pisa and Its Consequences.” In The Sage Handbook of Research in International Education. Eds. Mary Hayden, Jack Levey, and Jeff Thomson. London: SAGE, 2015. 488–98. Nye, Joseph S. “The Rise of China’s Soft Power.” Wall Street Journal Asia, December 29, 2005. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB113580867242333272. Odin, Jaishree K., and Peter T. Mancias, eds. Globalization and Higher Education. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004. Peck, Jamie, Nik Theodore, and Neil Brenner. “Postneoliberalism and Its Malcontents.” Antipode 41 (2010): 94–116. Pham, Lien. International Students Returning to Vietnam: Experiences of the Local Economies, Universities and Communities. Singapore: Springer, 2019. Proctor, Douglas, and Laura E. Rumbley (eds). The Future Agenda for internationalization in Higher Education: Next Generation Insights into Research, Policy, and Practice. New York: Routledge, 2018. Resnik, Julia. “International Organizations, the ‘Education–Economic Growth’ Black Box, and the Development of World Education Culture.” Comparative Education Review 50.2 (2006): 173–95. Rizvi, Fazal. “Epistemic Virtues and Cosmopolitan Learning.” Australian Educational Researcher 35.1 (2008): 17–35. Rizvi, Fazal. “School Internationalization and Its Implications for Higher Education.” In The Globalization of Internationalisation: Emerging Voices and Perspectives. Eds. Hans De Wit, Jocely Gacel-Avila, Elspeth Jones, and Nico Jooste. London: Routledge, 2017. 18–36. Rizvi, Fazal, and Bob Lingard. Globalizing Education Policy. London: Routledge, 2010. Roberts, Boyd. “Education for a Different World: How International Education Responds to Change.” In The Sage Handbook of Research in International Education. Eds. Mary Hayden, Jack Levey, and Jeff Thomson. London: SAGE, 2015. 88–107. Rumbley, Laura, Phillip Altbach, and Liz Reisberg. “Internationalization with the Higher Education Context.” In The Sage Handbook of International Higher Education. Eds. Darla K. Deardorf, Hans De Wit, John D. Heyl, and Tony Adams. London: SAGE, 2012. 3–26. Sen, Amartya. Development as Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Shaw, Martin. Global Society and International Relations: Sociological Theory and Political Perspectives. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994. Sylvester, Robert. “Historical Resources for Research in International Education (1851-1950).” In The Sage Handbook of Research in International Education. Eds. Mary Hayden, Jack Levey, and Jeff Thomson. London: SAGE, 2015. 13–27. Tansel, Cemal B. “Authoritarian Neoliberalism: Towards a New research Agenda.” In States of Discipline: Authoritarian Neoliberalism and the Contested Reproduction of Capitalist Order. Ed. Cemal Burak Tansel. London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017. 1–28. UNESCO. “Declaration of an Integrated Framework of Action on Education for Peace, Human Rights and Democracy.” UNESCO, 1995. https://www.peace-ed-campaign.org/declaration-integratedframework-action-education-peace-human-rights-democracy/.

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UNESCO. “Recommendation for International Understanding Cooperation and Peace and Education Relating to Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.” UNESCO, 1974. http://portal.unesco.org/ en/ev.php-URL_ID=13088andURL_DO=DO_TOPICandURL_SECTION=201.html. Unterhalter, Elaine. “What is Equity in Education? Reflections from the Capability Approach.” Studies in Philosophy and Education 28.5 (2009): 415–24. Van Gaalen, Adinda, and Susanne Feiertag. “Is There a Gap to Bridge between Internationalization in Secondary and Higher Education?” In The Future Agenda for Internationalization in Higher Education: Next Generation Insights into Research, Policy, and Practice. Eds. Douglas Proctor and Laura E. Rumbley. New York: Routledge, 2018. 199–211. Wei-ming, Tu, Bingyi Yu, and Zhaolu Lu. “Confucianism and Modernity: Insights from an Interview with Tu Wei-ming.” China Review International 7.2 (2000): 377–87. Wilson, David N. “Comparative and International Education: Fraternal or Siamese Twins? A Preliminary Genealogy of Our Twin Fields.” Comparative Education Review 38.4 (1994): 449–86. Yun, You. “Learning Experience: An Alternative Understanding Inspired by Thinking through Confucius.” ECNU Review of Education 3.1 (2020): 66–87.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Worlding International Relations SOPHIA A. MCCLENNEN

On January 3, 2020, US President Donald Trump ordered a drone strike that killed top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad, Iraq. The fallout from the event was immediate, yet the responses were predictable. Most importantly, they represent the core dilemma that I analyze in this chapter: namely, that the state system that is at the heart of the study of International Relations (IR) is flawed not because of the centrality of the United States as a superpower, but rather because of a selective, inconsistent, and unstable application of sovereignty, which favors Western nations.1 Before I dive more deeply into this dynamic and my suggestions for ways to reframe it, let me outline why the execution of Soleimani offers such a useful illustration of the flawed interstate system. Shortly after Soleimani was killed, we learned that previous US administrations had decided not to kill Soleimani because they worried such an act would put Americans at risk and would create greater unrest in the region. Note, here, for example, that the rationale not to kill Soleimani did not include a consideration of the fact that he was a high-ranking member of the military of a sovereign nation. We are told, instead, that Soleimani wasn’t murdered because it wouldn’t be an effective tactic. At no point was it discussed that it would not have been a good idea to kill him because it would have been a violation of international law and of the sovereign rights of a foreign nation. In order to fully grasp the depth of that omission, recall that Soleimani’s significance in the Iranian government was far higher than simply that of a top-ranking general. According to Roman Schweizer, managing director for aerospace and defense at the Cowen Washington Research Group, “this is the equivalent of Iran killing the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency and then taking credit for it.”2 We further learned that the Trump administration’s rationale for the execution was that “Soleimani was actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region.” According to official statements, the “strike was aimed at deterring future Iranian attack plans.”3 Leaving aside the fact that we subsequently learned that there was not, after all, any imminent threat, the critical takeaway for the purposes of this chapter is the fact that imminent threat can be used as a rationale for such an execution at all, ever. Imminent threat is an impossible logic were it to be applied to all nations because it would allow all sorts of preemptive strikes, creating far less security globally. Instead, what we learn is that the use of imminent threat as a rationale for a preemptive strike only works if certain states are allowed to use such a tactic, but not all. It is by necessity a selective strategy that only applies to a subset of nations. Thus, we find laid bare the hypocrisy that suggests

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that the United States can act preemptively if it perceives an imminent threat, yet Iran is not afforded the same standard. The justification for the validity of a preemptive strike reveals a clear hierarchy between which nations get to worry over their safety and which get to be punished before even acting. To process the mind-bogglingly inconsistent logic here—simply reverse the terms and imagine that Iran had gotten word of the plans to murder Soleimani and had preemptively executed the high-ranking US official suspected to be behind it. Then, to further process the absurdity of the imminent threat argument, imagine that the Iranians murdered the US official while he was in France, thereby committing an execution on the soil of another sovereign nation. Imagine France’s response. Then imagine what would happen if Iraq had a similar response. This thought experiment makes it possible to see that the execution of Soleimani was not just an example of how the United States does not respect the sovereignty of Iran; it is also an example of how it does not respect the sovereignty of Iraq. But that’s not all we can learn from this story. Shortly after news broke of Soleimani’s death, there was an influx of international reaction by Western leaders, which focused almost entirely on the fact that Trump had not sufficiently coordinated with allies, had taken unilateral action, and had likely escalated tensions. The chairman of the UK Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, Tom Tugendhat, stated that the United States’ closest allies weren’t properly consulted on its dramatic move.4 Not one Western nation expressed concern that the execution was an extrajudicial attack on a top-level official from a sovereign state. Instead, their criticisms were that they themselves had not been involved in the decision to attack. Other concerns centered on the idea that this move created greater instability. For example, the French minister for European affairs, Amélie de Montchalin, stated that “We have woken up to a more dangerous world.”5 Less than a week later, it was clear that de Montchalin was right. Blaming heightened tensions with the United States, Iran accidentally shot down a Ukraine International Airlines jet shortly after it took off in Tehran as it was heading for Kyiv. All 176 civilians on board died. The area where the plane was shot down was near a missile research center and other Iranian military sites, which would have been likely targets in an all-out war.6 Iran, in its heightened apprehension over a possible war, had reacted impulsively and with tragic consequence. Prior to the accidental attack on the Ukrainian jet, Iran had decided to offer a response to Soleimani’s execution and had attacked US bases in Iraq, with no casualties at all. If it had ended there, this story would be far less illustrative of a flawed interstate dynamic, even though the fact that Iran countered is still of note, because it is a reminder that it refused to acquiesce to a system that offers it no sovereign response to an attack. Yet, that was not the end of it. Rather, the escalated tensions led Iran to shoot down a commercial plane, and it was in that act that Iran was finally recognized by Western states as a sovereign nation. Yet that recognition came with the obligation to face consequences in the interstate system. The international response to the mistaken downing of the Ukrainian jet offers the critical piece of the story, because only in the moment that Iran failed the interstate system and killed civilians was it expected to operate as a sovereign nation, by taking responsibility and making amends. These two events—the execution of Soleimani and the downing of the Ukrainian jet— serve as valuable bookends for the arguments at the center of this chapter. While Trump may well have been the least respected US president in Western history, responses to his unilateral and unjustified use of force affirmed an ongoing reality at the center of international relations: only some rules of engagement apply some of the time for some nation-states. Setting aside some weak condemnations from the United Nations, the Trump administration’s decision

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to use a drone to execute a general from a sovereign nation, who was killed in a different sovereign nation, sparked no concerns among Western allies of accountability, nor did it lead them to issue calls for justice. In contrast, within hours of learning the details of Iran’s attack on a Ukrainian plane, leaders from the West insisted on accountability, investigations, and apologies. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau demanded “closure, accountability, transparency, and justice for the families and loved ones of the victims.”7 Up until the moment when they shot down the Ukrainian jet, Iran’s sovereignty had been entirely absent. There had not been one Western leader who expressed concern over it. Thus, when that attitude shifted and their sovereign accountability was demanded in the face of their accidental missile strike, it revealed the extent to which, for many non-Western nations, sovereignty exists only at the West’s discretion and only in the negative. Even more revealing, Iran responded by apologizing and by inviting investigators from Ukraine, NTSB, and Boeing to examine the crash. That is, Iran did take responsibility, and it did operate transparently and with respect to international law. Meanwhile, Trump came under virtually no scrutiny, not even after it was revealed that his administration’s claims that Soleimani posed an “imminent threat” were clearly manufactured.8 Days after the tragic Ukrainian plane attack, Trump tweeted that the “fake news media and their democrat partners are working hard to determine whether or not the future attack by terrorist Soleimani was ‘imminent’ or not.” He stressed that it had been imminent but added “it doesn’t really matter because of his horrible past!”9 This story reveals the selective, inconsistent, and unstable application of sovereignty that is at the heart of IR theory. And it explains why worlding IR is not the right path forward for the field. In fact, as I’ll explain below, there have been significant efforts to “world” the field, by uprooting the centrality of the United States as a gatekeeper for the discipline, yet these efforts miss the larger problems that plague IR’s ideological underpinnings. The problem with IR is not whether or not it is worlded, but, rather its acceptance of a selective, inconsistent, and unstable system of sovereignty that favors Western nations. What has to be destabilized are the cognitive containers that are the legible pillars of IR theory—international law, organizations, states—because inverting or reorganizing or worlding the core-periphery state model doesn’t get to the principal flaws with global sovereignty itself.

WHEN IS REALISM NOT BASED ON REALITY? AND HOW ARE STATES NOT SOVEREIGN? While there are various origin stories for the field of IR, most scholars concur that the academic study of IR dates specifically to responses to the First World War with the establishment of the Woodrow Wilson Chair of International Politics at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, in 1919.10 Reeling from the devastations of the war, scholars sought to create a new academic discipline that could prevent international conflict. Importantly, the early influencers of the field were all based in nations victorious from the war, yet they felt committed to seeking better answers to why states enter into conflict and how best to limit it. One of the central questions they considered was how to create an international order that would ensure that states complied with core defining principles. From the start, though, the idea that there would be shared core principles was fraught. IR theory from its early days—and still to a great extent today—is governed by two major schools of thought. The first position, initially described as liberalism, later referred to as idealism or

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even utopianism, was essentially framed by the idea that any interstate conflict was a result of two core problems: insufficient domestic democratic structures and inadequate international institutional structures. Liberalism embodied the belief that constitutional government, the rule of law, and universal applicability would lead to a harmony of interests and reduce interstate conflict. The second approach, dubbed Realism, which continues to play a major role in the field, emerged during the 1930s and grew in force as a response to the Second World War.11 Realism holds that the problem with idealism is that it does not consider that most international conflict is between the “haves” and the “have nots.” As E. H. Carr, father of IR realism, put it, the “have nots” have no respect for the rule of law, nor should they, because the laws are written to benefit the “haves.”12 Politics, he concludes, need to be based on the realism of this situation, and it is utopian to expect that the “have nots” will abide by laws that don’t benefit them. For him, the essential conflict was between the haves and have-nots, a powerdifferentiated relationship he assumed could not be diminished by international organizations, agreements, or protocols. One of the critical distinctions between these views was the notion that realists necessarily privilege security and interests over morality. Idealists, by contrast, assumed that states could meaningfully cooperate to create positive change if the right laws, institutions, and democratic principles were in place. Realists, it was claimed, dealt with the world as it is; idealists as they wished it would be. But, was the realist approach to IR really “realist”? And was liberalism’s flaw really its utopianism? Consider, for example, that in the case of Soleimani’s execution it is the United States that did not abide by the rule of law, rather than Iran. In fact, Iran, by any neutral account, conducted itself in a far more diplomatic manner that is more respectful of international law than the actions of the United States. In that sense, the behavior of Iran countermands the notion that the “realist” view is simply common sense. The reason why these purportedly opposing views offer a flawed foundation for IR theory is because they don’t adequately deal with the problem of sovereignty. In fact, they take sovereignty as a premise, which may have been a consequence of the post-Westphalian Western framework within which the field was originally conceived. As Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye argued back in 1974, realist analyses of world politics generally “assumed that states are the only significant actors.”13 That notion has held true over time. As Chris Brown and Kirsten Ainley explain in their 2009 IR textbook, Understanding International Relations, the “conventional definition of the field is … that IR is the study of the relations of states, and that those relations are understood primarily in diplomatic, military, and strategic terms.”14 The “relations” of IR depend on the definition of the state, which IR distinguishes by its sovereignty, understood as legal autonomy. As Brown and Ainley put it, “sovereign states are sovereign because no higher body has the right to issue orders to them.”15 Here, then, is where the critical gap takes place in the field. Because influence between states is understood in IR theory as power, not authority.16 Yet, that distinction is absurd. Put simply, power is authority. And thus, those states with more power are the only ones that have the authority to be truly sovereign. IR theory, though, refused to recognize this reality, making so-called realist approaches to IR unrealistic. Realism rested on the idea that the problem was between haves and have-nots; instead the problem was that more powerful states refused to recognize the sovereignty of less powerful states, except, as in the Iran case above, when that recognition meant requiring a state to make amends. In addition, more powerful states ignore the fact that their persistent efforts to exercise power and authority

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over weaker states result in an incapacity to fully develop a model of sovereignty for less powerful states. This flaw is at the heart of the problems with both idealism and realism, since they each fail to account for the fact that most international relations are between states that are not, in fact, sovereign. What’s more, even critics of realism, like Keohane and Nye, who advocated for focusing on transgovernmental relations back in the 1970s, still assume that the states studied by realists are fundamentally equivalent units. Their critique rests on the idea that focusing on states is flawed, since “sub-units,” like cabinets, exercise power.17 They further argue that the statecentric focus of realism pays too much attention to conflict and war rather than to the other multifarious relationships between states. Yet, by their own admission, their work focuses uniquely on “policy interdependence among developed-country governments,” leaving aside those states that, as I’ve explained it, are included in the state system but excluded from sovereignty.18 The problem is not about respect for the rule of law, nor is it between haves and havenots; rather, it is between states that can presume their legal autonomy and states that rarely experience it. If few states have the power to exercise their authority in the interstate system, then the issue isn’t realism versus idealism; it is the notion that a state can be forced to play by international rules that only offer them authority in the moment when they are to be held accountable for failing the system. Idealists imagined all states would play by the rules if the rules and groundwork were sufficiently developed. Realists offered that the power differentials between states would always set them on a course for conflict. But neither theory accounted for the fact that they were comparing apples and oranges, and that the states they were studying were simply not the same elements on the political periodic table.

WHY AN INTERNATIONAL FIELD OF STUDY NEEDED TO BE WORLDED The odd way that IR framed itself largely as a study of states, where interstate sovereignty was presumed but not practiced, was further exacerbated by the dominance of Western and specifically US hegemony in the field. In fact, US hegemony offers the critical backdrop to the problem of sovereignty for IR. At around the same time as Keohane and Nye’s interventions into IR theory, Stanley Hoffmann famously described IR as an “American social science.”19 Moving into the twenty-first century, many of the same dynamics persisted, despite the fact, as Amitav Acharya pointed out in his 2014 presidential address to the International Studies Association, that “IR schools, departments, institutes, and conventions have mushroomed around the world.”20 For him, the reality that the practice of IR had become global while the theory remained Western, mainly American, was an even bigger issue: “The discipline of International Relations (IR) does not reflect the voices, experiences, knowledge claims, and contributions of the vast majority of the societies and states in the world, and often marginalizes those outside the core countries of the west.”21 Perhaps, even more importantly, the hegemony of the United States in IR theory is not simply a perceived dominance but one that has been well documented. A 2008 article by Wiebke Keim found that 58 percent of the total literature covered by the Social Sciences Citation index is authored or coauthored by scholars affiliated with the United States, while all of Western Europe accounts for 25 percent, Latin America for 1 percent, and the entire African continent for less than 1 percent.22 Keim, though, looked at all social science citations, whereas another project focused specifically on trends within IR. Based at the College of

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William and Mary, the Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) Project was launched in 2003 as the most extensive data-collection effort to date on the subfield of IR.23 It offers empirical analysis of the relationships between pedagogy, scholarship, and international policy. They have gathered data by coding articles published in the top twelve IR and political science journals from 1980 to 2015, running extensive surveys of IR faculty and building databases to investigate the topics analyzed and representation of academic knowledge within IR scholarship and teaching. From the start, TRIP confirmed what many suspected, namely that the United States was overwhelmingly central in a field that was purportedly “international.” The results of the 2014 TRIP project found that there was considerable evidence of US dominance of the field in terms of citations, recognition, dominance of theory production, and production of PhDs.24 The 2014 TRIP Survey found that a clear majority of its respondents believe that IR is both American-dominated and Western-dominated. When asked if IR is an American-dominated discipline, 49 percent agreed and 11 percent strongly agreed—a total of 60 percent. When asked if IR is a Western-dominated discipline, 53 percent agreed and 22 percent strongly agreed, meaning that 75 percent of the total number of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that IR is a Western-dominated discipline.25 This despite the fact that scholars had long called for a “worlding” of the field. For decades, scholars had pointed to the problems caused by American hegemony of the field, yet, as Gerard Holden explains, postcolonial scholarship “made a relatively late entry into International Relations.”26 He signals that the first real foray of postcolonial theory into the field appeared as late as 2007, but then quickly moved apace leading eventually to a Routledge series edited by Arlene Tickner and Ole Weaver entitled “Worlding the west.” The editors state that the series identifies “alternatives for thinking about the ‘international’ that are more in tune with local concerns and traditions outside the west.”27 In their foundational volume of the series, International Relations Scholarship and the World (2009), Tickner and Weaver explain that “It has become widely accepted that the discipline of International Relations (IR) is ironically not ‘international’ at all. IR scholars are part of a global discipline with a single, shared object of study—the world, and yet theorizing gravitates around a number of concepts that have been conceived solely in the United States.”28 They explain that the purpose of their book is to rebalance this “western bias” by examining the ways in which IR has evolved and is practiced around the world.” The efforts to “world” IR, though, remained largely ontological, sidestepping any serious need to reframe and recast the ideological premises of the field. In their introduction to the founding volume of the series, Tickner and Weaver call on scholars to imagine and create “other worlds,”29 yet for the most part these imaginings are more squarely focused on unraveling the core-periphery model. As Tickner explains it in a 2013 article, “Core periphery and (neo) imperialist International Relations,” the centrality of Western theory is not just a function of Western scholars; it is a pattern replicated by scholars working outside of the West as well: “Peripheral scholars themselves reproduce these asymmetries by referring overwhelmingly to core literatures. Over half of the journal articles published in Latin American and Asian journals refer to U.S. sources, while European sources account for over half of the citations in African journal articles.”30 When scholarship on “worlding” IR moved beyond ontology to epistemology, it often did so, again, from an ontological standpoint. The theory, it was thought, would reframe when the origin of those thoughts was displaced outside the West. Tickner and Weaver explain it in their introduction as the practice of identifying intersecting “practices of colonizing,

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resisting, and reshaping” IR theory through an emphasis on “geocultural epistemologies” that indicate that this “worlding” may be conducted differently in different places.31 Yet, as Tickner admits, the effort to “world” IR may be more for the benefit of the core than the periphery since the efforts to debate the issue seem more central to “core” scholarship than peripheral.32 But, even more, the effort may be in vain, because little change is in evidence. In 2017, Acharya revisited his earlier call to world IR in an essay entitled, “Why is there no Non-western International Relations theory?” He surveys shifts in the field since his seminal presidential address and notes “the persistence of American and western dominance [and] a serious disconnect between western scholars and those from the Global South.”33 A 2020 volume, Globalizing IR Theory, edited by Yaqing Qin suggests that after decades of debate over how to “world” IR there remains little, to no real change. “Despite attempts to redress the balance, international relations (IR) as a discipline is still dominated by western theories.”34

A CASE FOR (OTHER)WORLDING My argument is that the problems intrinsic to IR are not essentially in the core-periphery model, but rather in the deeply different degrees of sovereignty that states in the world system enjoy. That the differences in degrees of sovereignty map to postcolonial logics is both symptom and cause. And, more importantly, these differences are so visible that they often eclipse the root problem of discriminate sovereignty itself. But here’s the thing. Until and unless periphery states are recognized as sovereign there is little point to inverting power dynamics among scholars and their theories. And, even more, the temporary, inconsistent and externally imposed sovereignty we see operating in cases like the one I’ve described between the United States and Iran are mirrored in academia too. How else to explain the calls to “world” IR that operate more as window dressing than true paradigm shift? Considered this way, inverting power dynamics operates as a way to whitewash the far deeper problems that underlie the imbalanced relations between states. Let’s think this through by going back to Iran because Iran is one of a handful of nations that have simply refused to acquiesce to a world system that only allows it to be sovereign some of the time and for some states and under some circumstances. As Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett explain in Going to Tehran: Why America Must Accept the Islamic Republic of Iran, the United States has spent almost forty years denying the autonomy of Iran. As point of fact, they highlight the purported “surprise” of the United States in the wake of the 1978–79 Iranian Revolution. As the Leveretts explain, “the only reason it was a surprise was official Washington’s denial of the Iranian people’s growing demand for an independent political order free from American domination.”35 They explain that throughout US–Iran relations, the common denominator has been a patent refusal on the part of the United States to acknowledge Iranian sovereignty. The Leveretts claim that most of what the West hears about Iran is formed by a series of myths that are designed to justify the refusal of the United States to acknowledge Iranian autonomy, especially the autonomy that led to the Iranian Revolution. Yet, interestingly, most Western accounts ignore the reality that the revolution was a consequence of decades of Iranian rule by a leader controlled by the West, whose main directive was to protect US and British oil interests over that of the Iranian population. As the Leveretts point out, much Western attention to the revolution focuses on the Islamic nature of the revolution, but not its grounding in self-determination. Focusing, though, on the religious nature of the revolution

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misses its political aims. According to the Leveretts, Ayatollah Khomeini, who rose to power in Iran after the Shah was deposed, “was intensely devoted to restoring the full measure of Iran’s sovereign independence after a century and a half of foreign domination and rule by puppet regimes.”36 Thus, the United States stubbornly refused to accept that much of what drove the revolution was directly a consequence of Iran’s frustration with their lack of political autonomy. This then brings us back to the execution of Soleimani. The Leveretts point out that since the Iranian Revolution US policy toward the Islamic state has been “barely veiled support for regime change.”37 Again, it is worth considering this in the reverse—an exercise that is not difficult to do given the fact that there has been ample evidence of Iranian aggressions toward US policy. But consider this: when Iran has challenged US interests, whether economically or politically, what has Western reaction been? We can think this through with the latest development in the Soleimani story. On June 29, 2020, news broke that Iran had issued an arrest warrant for President Trump and thirty-five others over the killing of Soleimani and had asked Interpol for help.38 By the end of the day, not one Western leader had expressed support for Iran. Instead, US Iran envoy Brian Hook said the warrant was a “propaganda stunt” at a news conference in Saudi Arabia. “This is of a political nature,” Hook stated. “This has nothing to do with national security, international peace or promoting stability … It is a propaganda stunt that no-one takes seriously.”39 Every point I have made in this chapter is present in his statement: any effort by Iran to exercise sovereignty is unintelligible and even considered laughable. Its legitimate claims to national security are literally incomprehensible. Its autonomy, important to Iran and its allies, vanishes before Western eyes. But, more significantly, Iran’s diplomacy vanishes as well, because issuing a warrant for an extrajudicial execution of a high-ranking official makes a claim to autonomy and accountability without unnecessary conflict. Yet not one Western leader recognized that. Given these realities, it is hard to know how one might “world” the realism that underpins IR theory in a way that could be illuminating. Rather, as I’ve suggested, the strategy must be otherworldly, and it must do more than restructure the hierarchies of states, scholars, and citations. Instead, it has to rethink how states are expected to operate in a world system absent a consistent, stable, and universal application of sovereignty.

NOTES 1 I’ll follow the common convention of using International Relations to refer to the academic field and international relations to refer to the global interactions the field investigates. 2 Natasha Turak, “‘The Puppet Master Is Dead’: Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani’s Power, and Why His Death Is Such a Big Deal,” CNBC January 7, 2020, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/03/whowas-iranian-general-qasem-soleimani-and-why-his-killing-matters.html. 3 Ryan Pickrell, “The Trump Administration Is Struggling to Explain Why the US Killed Top Iranian General Soleimani—Here’s All the Shifting Explanations,” Business Insider, January 13, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-administrations-shifting-explanations-for-soleimanikilling–2020–1. 4 Aamna Mohdin, Ben Quinn, Mario Koran, Joan E. Greve, Martin Farrer, Richard Luscombe, Patrick Wintour, and Oliver Holmes, “US Denies Latest Airstrikes Targeting Iraqi Militia in Baghdad—as It Happened,” The Guardian, January 4, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/ live/2020/jan/03/iran-general-qassem-suleimani-killed-us-trump-drone-strike-baghdad-reactionlive-updates?page=with%3Ablock-5e0f4e3b8f087e8308e67f09.

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5 France 24, “Trump’s No ‘Stupid’ Wars Doctrine Faces Biggest Test,” France 24, January 3, 2020, https://www.france24.com/en/20200103-trump-s-no-stupid-wars-doctrine-faces-biggest-test. 6 James Doubek, “Iran Says It Shot Down Ukrainian Jetliner by Mistake,” NPR, January 11, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/01/10/795480690/iran-unintentionally-shot-down-ukrainian-jetlinerkilling-176-people. 7 Doubek, “Iran Says It Shot Down Ukrainian Jetliner by Mistake.” 8 Pickrell, “The Trump Administration Is Struggling.” 9 Ibid. 10 Joanna Jones, “Timeline of Events,” Timeline of Events—Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University, July 4, 2017, https://www.aber.ac.uk/en/interpol/about/centenary/ interpollegacy/timelineofevents. 11 Despite the various transformations in the field of IR, realism still occupies a relatively dominant place not only for US-based scholars but also for scholars based in other nations. The 2014 TRIP analysis suggested that realism was on the wane, yet it remained the dominant theoretical approach, especially when factoring in the core texts issued in introductory IR courses. For more, see Wiebke Wemheuer-Vogelaar, Nicholas Bell, Michael Tierney, and Mariana N. Morales, “The IR of the Beholder: Examining Global IR using the 2014 TRIP Survey,” International Studies Review 18 (2016): 16–32. 12 Edward H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (London: Macmillan Press, 1939). 13 Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, “Transgovernmental Relations and International Organizations,” World Politics 27.1 (1974): 39–62. 14 Chris Brown and Kirsten Ainley, Understanding International Relations (London: Macmillan Press, 2009), 3. 15 Brown and Ainley, Understanding International Relations, 3. 16 It is important to note that beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s, much IR theory attempted to move away from the focus on conflict and interstate relations. Since the 1970s, a strong faction of IR has framed the binding ties in the world community in terms of the “low politics” of wealth and welfare, of the “new dimensions of peace,” and of the new problems on the international agenda. See, for example, Keohane and Nye, “Transgovernmental Relations and International Organizations.” 17 Ibid. 18 For previous work on this topic, see Sophia A. McClennen, “The Rights to Debt,” The Debt Age, eds. Jeffrey Di Leo, Peter Hitchcock, and Sophia A. McClennen (New York: Routledge, 2018), 13–26; Sophia A. McClennen, “Neoliberalism as Terrorism; Or State of Disaster Exceptionalism,” Terror, Theory, and the Humanities, eds. Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Uppinder Mehan (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2012), 178–95. 19 Stanley Hoffmann, “An American Social Science: International Relations,” Daedalus 106.3 (1977): 41–60. 20 Amitav Acharya, “Global International Relations (IR) and Regional Worlds,” A New Agenda for International Studies, International Studies Quarterly 58 (2014): 647. 21 Ibid. 22 W. Keim, “Social Sciences Internationally: The Problem of Marginalisation and Its Consequences for the Discipline of Sociology,” African Sociological Review 12.2 (2008): 28. 23 TRIP, “Home: Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP),” June 30, 2020, https://trip. wm.edu/. 24 Wemheuer-Vogelaar, Bell, Tierney, and Morales, “The IR of the Beholder.” 25 Ibid. 26 Gerard Holden, “Worlding beyond the West,” Cooperation and Conflict 49.1 (2014): 133–40. 27 Routledge, “Worlding beyond the West,” Routledge & CRC Press Series, https://www.routledge. com/Worlding-Beyond-the-West/book-series/WBW.

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28 Arlene B. Tickner and Ole Waever, International Relations Scholarship around the World (London: Routledge, 2009). 29 Ibid., 9; emphasis in the original. 30 Arlene B. Tickner, “Core, Periphery and (Neo)Imperialist International Relations,” European Journal of International Relations 19.3 (2013): 627–46. 31 Ibid., 9. 32 Ibid., 632. 33 Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan, “Why Is There No Non-Western International Relations Theory?” International Relations of the Asia-Pacific 16.3 (2017): 341–70. 34 Yaqing Qin, “Globalizing IR Theory,” Routledge 1 (2020): 1–192. 35 Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett, “Going to Tehran: Why America Must Accept the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Picador 1 (2013): 141. 36 Ibid., 154. 37 Ibid., 280. 38 Babak Dehghanpisheh, Lisa Barrington, Richard Lough, and Kevin Liffey, “Iran Issues Warrant for Trump over Killing of Top General,” Reuters, June 29, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/usiran-usa-warrant/iran-issues-warrant-for-trump-over-killing-of-top-general-idUSKBN2401HO. 39 Ibid.

WORKS CITED Acharya, Amitav. “Global International Relations (IR) and Regional Worlds.” A New Agenda for International Studies. International Studies Quarterly 58 (2014): 647. Acharya, Amitav, and Barry Buzan. “Why Is There No Non-Western International Relations Theory?” International Relations of the Asia-Pacific 16.3 (2017): 341–70. Brown, Chris, and Kirsten Ainley. Understanding International Relations. London: Macmillan Press, 2009. Carr, Edward H. The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919-1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations. London: Macmillan Press, 1939. Dehghanpisheh, Babak, Lisa Barrington, Richard Lough, and Kevin Liffey. “Iran Issues Warrant for Trump over Killing of Top General.” Reuters June 29, 2020. https://www.reuters.com/article/usiran-usa-warrant/iran-issues-warrant-for-trump-over-killing-of-top-general-idUSKBN2401HO. Doubek, James. “Iran Says It Shot Down Ukrainian Jetliner By Mistake.” NPR, January 11, 2020. https://www.npr.org/2020/01/10/795480690/iran-unintentionally-shot-down-ukrainian-jetlinerkilling-176-people. France 24. “Trump’s No ‘Stupid’ Wars Doctrine Faces Biggest Test.” France 24, January 3, 2020. https://www.france24.com/en/20200103-trump-s-no-stupid-wars-doctrine-faces-biggest-test. Hoffmann, Stanley. “An American Social Science: International Relations.” Daedalus 106. 3 (1977): 41–60. Holden, Gerard. “Worlding beyond the West.” Cooperation and Conflict 49.1 (2014): 133–40. Jones, Joanna. “Timeline of Events.” Timeline of Events—Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University, July 4, 2017. https://www.aber.ac.uk/en/interpol/about/centenary/ interpollegacy/timelineofevents. Keim, W. “Social Sciences Internationally: The Problem of Marginalisation and Its Consequences for the Discipline of Sociology.” African Sociological Review 12.2 (2008): 28. Keohane, Robert O., and Joseph S. Nye. “Transgovernmental Relations and International Organizations.” World Politics 27.1 (1974): 39–62. Leverett, Flynt, and Hillary Mann Leverett. “Going to Tehran: Why America Must Accept the Islamic Republic of Iran.” Picador 1 (2013): 1–496. McClennen, Sophia A. “Neoliberalism as Terrorism; Or State of Disaster Exceptionalism.” Terror, Theory, and the Humanities. Eds. Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Uppinder Mehan. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2012: 178–95.

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McClennen, Sophia A. “The Rights to Debt.” The Debt Age. Eds. Jeffrey Di Leo, Peter Hitchcock, and Sophia A. McClennen. New York: Routledge, 2018. 13–26. Mohdin, Aamna, Ben Quinn, Mario Koran, Joan E. Greve, Martin Farrer, Richard Luscombe, Patrick Wintour, and Oliver Holmes. “US Denies Latest Airstrikes Targeting Iraqi Militia in Baghdad—as It Happened.” The Guardian, January 4, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2020/ jan/03/iran-general-qassem-suleimani-killed-us-trump-drone-strike-baghdad-reaction-liveupdates?page=with%3Ablock-5e0f4e3b8f087e8308e67f09. Pickrell, Ryan. “The Trump Administration Is Struggling to Explain Why the US Killed Top Iranian General Soleimani—Here’s All the Shifting Explanations.” Business Insider, January 13, 2020. https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-administrations-shifting-explanations-for-soleimanikilling-2020-1. Qin, Yaqing. “Globalizing IR Theory.” Routledge 1 (2020): 1–192. Routledge. “Worlding beyond the West.” Routledge & CRC Press Series. https://www.routledge.com/ Worlding-Beyond-the-West/book-series/WBW. Tickner, Arlene B. “Core, Periphery and (Neo)Imperialist International Relations.” European Journal of International Relations 19.3 (2013): 627–46. Tickner, Arlene B., and Ole Waever. International Relations Scholarship around the World. London: Routledge, 2009. TRIP. “Home: Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP).” June 30, 2020. https://trip. wm.edu/. Turak, Natasha. “‘The Puppet Master Is Dead’: Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani’s Power, and Why His Death Is Such a Big Deal.” CNBC, January 7, 2020. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/03/who-wasiranian-general-qasem-soleimani-and-why-his-killing-matters.html. Wemheuer-Vogelaar, Wiebke, Nicholas Bell, Michael Tierney, and Mariana N. Morales. “The IR of the Beholder: Examining Global IR Using the 2014 TRIP Survey.” International Studies Review 18 (2016): 16–32.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Worlding Media Studies TOBY MILLER AND JESÚS ARROYAVE

For decades, unrepresentative examples have been used to theorize, evaluate, and “reform” media systems around the globe. More vibrant and diverse theoretical and research projects have been happening and continue to emerge. This chapter examines both how the Global North became the idée fixe of media studies, thanks to teleological models of development and parthenogenetic scholars, and how efforts to decenter it as the customary site of theorization have emanated from the Global South, where different epistemologies enrich media studies. Our eyes are on both the humanities and social sciences, for media studies is undertaken from many disciplines within each, be they focused around language, text, policy, audience, ownership, control, or neo-imperialism.

HOPES AND OBSTACLES What would a world media studies look like? It would need to be very interdisciplinary, to include scholars and practitioners adept in literature, translation, culture, law, technology, labor, nationalism, area studies, ethnography, communications, sociology, and political economy. It would publish in multiple languages, notably the most widespread international ones—Arabic, French, Spanish, and English—as well as those of major media areas where languages are more nationally based, such as Indonesian, Mandarin, Tagalog, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Hindi, and Japanese. And it would operate in the spirit of multisited ethnography.1 So, to understand the US-based Spanish-language broadcast television network Univision, one would investigate how it makes, buys, and broadcasts its programs; the experiences of the workers involved; technologies of production and distribution; programming; and its varied domestic audience, which is drawn from the fifty-odd million people who are migrants to the United States from Mexico, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Cuba, inter alia, or locals with Latin American heritage. As currently constituted, media studies is ill-equipped to do these things, even within that relatively simple backdrop of a huge linguistic minority in a wealthy nation of massive research capacity. And the story becomes quite different when one tries to evaluate the media world of Bangladeshis or Sri Lankans, in their own countries or elsewhere. The difficulty arises for two reasons: the history of studying the media in the disciplines mentioned above and the chronic imbalance of research resources around the world. Media studies is deeply provincial, for all that it is avowedly steeped in an international worldview as well as a domestic one. The story of world media begins with modern conquest and the imperial platforms first established by peninsularists in the Americas. The media informed imperial expansion through texts that incarnated the religious fervor of Spain’s conquista de América, Portugal’s

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missão civilizadora, then France and Britain’s mission civilisatrice, as Western Europe sought to remake the globe in its own phantasmatic image.2 The Spanish wrote self-aggrandizing tracts that celebrated killing native peoples but soon adopted policies to encourage higher birth rates once the Crown decided it was wiser to convert a flock and conserve a workforce.3 Queen Isabella’s functionaries established Castilian as a mode of conquest and management, realizing that “language was always the companion of empire.” Along with Christianity, it would “put under her yoke many barbarous peoples and nations of alien languages.” With physical conquest came linguistic and hence codified rule.4 After the chronicles of the conquistadores came stories written by ships’ merchants. They created the first periodicals, which became the first mass medium: the newspaper. International media studies has been scarred since those conquests by similar desires for conversion and control. Its dominant “administrative research” supports technological innovation, buoyant demand, audience measurement, marketing, regulation, enforcement of property relations, and so on, in the name of capitalist efficiency and governmental normativity—making markets function plus ensuring a docile populace.5 This is especially— and almost proudly—the case of those operating within functionalist communication studies and its latter-day incarnation, the creative industries.6 The field really took off with the growth of higher education during the Cold War. An “obsessional concern with the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union” produced Anglo versions of a “world according to America,” dividing the globe between authoritarian, libertarian, social-democratic, and Soviet systems, clearly betraying what was as much a political project as an intellectual one.7 The targets of the ensuing proxy struggles were Latin America and new African and Asian states emerging from imperial control, which were seen as potentially drawn to Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideas if they were not shown the one true path to life, liberty, and the pursuit of cornflakes. Modernization theory had its heyday during this period, manifest in international media research as “development communication.”8 Daniel Lerner’s The Passing of Traditional Society and Wilbur Schramm’s Mass Media and National Development were foundational texts.9 The model privileged vertical communication, psychologistic accounts of subjectivity, and functionalist views of the media as means of transforming the “Third World.”10 It conceptualized “developing” societies’ “backwardness” as a result of irrational and sectarian beliefs, attitudes, and behavior that could be rectified by media campaigns covering health, agriculture, weather, and citizenship, urging populations to adopt national in place of tribal forms of identification. Diffusion from the Global North was the order of the day in an unreconstructed narcissism undertaken across the social sciences almost entirely by white men, linked and remunerated by state forces masquerading within civil society.11 Today, new pressures encourage apolitical work. Consider the endless whirl of applying for grants in the European Union and the United States. Without such support, many researchers would not make a living or have time to study. But these people apply, succeed—and do the work funding bodies want. This leads to a welter of administrative research into such topics as: how a small population can develop a TV industry; how new technologies engage people; the map of coproductions; the revenue a given country makes from overseas drama sales; how YouTube stars emerge; the impact of playing first-person shooter games on students attending “a large university in the mid-west”; how to remove barriers to market entry; and difficulties faced by archivists. Those topics have important political aspects. But people diligently report on their sponsored research in the terms under which they applied for funding (i.e., minus politics) and structure their conclusions based on the need for further research (i.e., minus politics).

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There are important exceptions, mostly to do with the representation on- and off-screen of social identities. But we read little in media studies about the global exploitation of labor; ownership and control; regulation underpinning oligopolies; the annihilation or distortion of minorities (think of British TV drama ignoring Polish and Brazilian residents); tax breaks for indolent local producers and eagle-eyed Hollywood ones in search of interest-free loans or investment without equity; the social relations of technological innovation; and the environmental impact of making, watching, and disposing of media devices. Yet you might find these matters covered in Screen International, Wired, The Economist, Hollywood Reporter, the Financial Times, or Television Business International, albeit from the perspectives of the powerful. But they do not shift the données of administrative research. Thomas Hanitzsch notes that journalism is always seen as an “Anglo-Saxon invention,” even though its origin as an area of scholarly inquiry was 1918 China.12 And media historiography dates journalism in Latin America from the conquistadores importing the printing press, which ignores a rich oral and hieroglyphic tradition among indigenous groups that provided essential information for subsistence and socialization.13 The dominant paradigm is as historically inaccurate as it is “successful.”

ASSOCIATIONS AND JOURNALS The production of knowledge in the human sciences more generally is asymmetrical and partial, perpetuating the hegemony of the Global North.14 Authors write in one language, adhere to particular methodologies, and cite those who occupy positions of power, such as presidents of professional associations, journal editors, and editorial board members, grimly excluding epistemological perspectives that depart from the established rules of the game. If we look at the scholarly bodies dedicated to studying global media, what do we find? The President of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) is in New York, its President-Elect in Oregon, its Treasurer in California, and its Secretary in Ohio.15 All past presidents worked in US universities.16 Leaders of the putatively International Communication Association (ICA) are based in the Global North—largely white men, and almost all Gringos.17 During the Cold War, ICA was known behind closed doors and shushing hands as “the CIA.” Its “KGB” rival was the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR—formerly the International Association for Mass Communication Research). IAMCR is the more truly global entity. But it showed similar traces: from 1957 to 1990 its presidents were Western European and US men. That changed when the Cold War ended and identity politics climaxed, but the principal officeholders continued, remorselessly, to be drawn from people whose working conditions, publication records, and prominence were founded in the security of the Global North.18 There are many more opportunities to publish research than even two decades ago. But that does not mean the process is more open or democratic.19 For example, ICA’s Journal of Communication appoints editors, associate editors, and board members from the Global North.20 There is some gender and racial diversity, but very much in US multicultural terms. It has never been edited by someone outside that country. SCMS’s Journal of Cinema and Media Studies is the same—everyone listed as a board member or editor is from the Global North.21 This feels like the power élite so eloquently described by C. Wright Mills,22 albeit with lower stakes, and there are theoretical and methodological corollaries. Across the Journal of Communication’s first six decades, 79.1 percent of articles were quantitative, 16.7 percent

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qualitative, and 4.2 percent used mixed methods. Of the nine most prominent theories, none emanated from the Global South.23 Media studies is not alone in these tendencies: about 90 percent of social science publications in the Web of Science (WoS) have addresses in the Global North.24 Publications in different disciplines from 1975 to 2017 see just 4 percent of articles from the Global South.25 The two hundred highest-ranked journals in the Social Science Citation Index and WoS find authors blissfully ignoring knowledge from the Global South—the citation of “others” by European and North American researchers over the last thirty years is virtually zero. US authors overwhelmingly mention their compatriots (from 1983 to 1985, the figure was 82.9 percent; 1993 to 1995, 80.2 percent; and 2003 to 2005, 76.7 percent). Sometimes they deem West Europeans worthy of citation: (1983–1985: 15.8 percent; 1993–1995: 18.3 percent; and 2003–2005: 21.9 percent). They ignore knowledge produced in the rest of the world,26 and English-speaking countries dominate.27 Meanwhile, bibliometric systems in the Anglosphere seem to be blind to databases such as Latindex, Dialnet, and Redib that counter the hegemony of WoS and Scopus. There are numerous English-language denunciations of the Global North’s domination of media studies. These concerns are generally penned by scholars working in Research-One US or UK universities, regardless of their points of origin. They rarely write outside English, or beyond places where their principal audiences will be hegemons. Their points of appeal tend to be about the exclusion of racial and ethnic minorities from power in Britain and the white settler colonies, from the United States to Aotearoa/New Zealand. Their discourse is often about minority recognition within those countries, in itself a crucial intervention. But their points of reference are generally expatriates or minorities—rarely those writing in other languages and doing so from the Global South. That may alter the demography of hegemony, but the most notable associations and journals determinedly maintain the prevailing geography, publications, and language—their hegemons do not live in poor countries and keep on publishing, as we are doing here, in English. Who can blame them? That is how they get noticed and rewarded. But does that globalize media studies?

ACTUALLY EXISTING ALTERNATIVES Marginalized regions have not been silent in the attempt to decenter established doxa. Latin Americans generated a theory of dependent development in the 1940s to explain how the industrial takeoff experienced by Western Europe and the United States had not occurred elsewhere. It gained adherents across the Global South over the next three decades in reaction to its explanation that rich societies at the world core had become so through their colonial and international ventures—importing ideas, fashions, and people from the periphery while exporting media texts.28 For decades, scholars in the Global South have challenged development communication for its media imperialism. Luis Ramiro Beltrán described the latter as “a verifiable process of social influence by which a nation imposes on other countries its set of beliefs, values, knowledge, and behavioral norms as well as its overall style of life.”29 That criticism attributed US and Western European political, military, and economic hegemony to dominance over news agencies, advertising, market research, public opinion, screen trade, technology, propaganda, and infrastructure. The long history of US participation in Latin American and South-East Asian politics and wars led to particular critiques of military interventions against

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struggles of national liberation, targeting links between the military-industrial complex and the media. The United States in particular transferred its dominant value system to others, with a corresponding diminution in the vitality and standing of local languages, traditions, and national identities. Lesser, but still considerable, influence was attributed to older imperial powers, via their cultural, military, and corporate ties to newly independent countries. Such critiques of media imperialism resonate in everyday talk, broadcast and telecommunications policy, unions, international organizations, nationalistic media and heritage, cultural diplomacy, anti-Americanism, and post-industrial service-sector planning.30 There has also been great interest in ideas about hegemonic culture: Southern Italy between the Wars was akin to an “undeveloped” nation. Unsurprisingly, extensive use has been made of Antonio Gramsci’s writings from that conjuncture in South Asia and segments of the Arab and African worlds.31 Across Latin America, his notion of the national-popular harnessing of class interests is common sense for both left and right.32 In Colombia, these ideas were adapted from the 1950s by academics, social movements, arts educators, writers, the teachers’ union, and the Communist Party.33 A commitment to social and cultural justice as well as academic theorization and research has proven magnetic to many subordinate groups entering academia from the Global South over the last fifty years. Hence the appeal of studying the media not only at the conventional scholarly metropoles, but in Mexico, Brazil, Turkey, India, and other important sites that are all too accustomed to being theorized and analyzed, and all too unfamiliar with being regarded as the sources of ideas, not merely places for their application. This is the case with two topics blithely neglected by media studies associations, textbooks, journals, conferences, editors, and books in the Global North: labor and the environment.

LABOR AND ENVIRONMENT Mexico is the world’s largest exporter of television sets, alongside China, Thailand, Malaysia, and Việt Nam. The nation’s young population, technological expertise, proximity to youknow-who, and taste for free-trade agreements make wages and other costs competitive in the New International Division of Cultural Labor.34 TV manufacturing is undertaken in border maquiladoras, with components imported from the United States, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, Malaysia, South Korea, and Thailand.35 Major manufacturers have included Sanyo, Sony, Samsung, JVC, Hitachi, and Panasonic. Tijuana is “TV Capital of the World.”36 The work is dangerous, dull, and poorly remunerated.37 Wages decline even when productivity increases. Two full-time workers in a Mexican plant receive two-thirds of the pay needed to support a family of four—prior to medical and educational expenses. Employees are denied collective-bargaining rights and legal protection of privacy, health, and safety. And they cannot afford to purchase what they make—flat-screen sets cost less in San Diego than in Tijuana, because tariff-free manufactures there are strictly for export.38 Do such concerns form part of global media studies? Not thus far. The discipline has also failed to get to the nub of how the media damage people and the Earth. Like electronics production in general, TV relies on exorbitant water use and carcinogens. Most color televisions historically used cathode-ray tubes (CRTs), which send electrons from cesium cathodes into high-voltage electrodes that project onto phosphorescent screens and emit radiation to illuminate phosphors. CRTs are comprised of zinc, copper,

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cesium, cadmium, silver, and lead. Major environmental problems occur both when they are made and discarded. Componentry seeps into underground water, leaving a legacy of heavy metals and toxic chemicals. This worsened with the transition to digital broadcasting, when millions of analog sets, perhaps the hardest of all manufactures to recycle, were thrown away.39 Workers, activists, and scientists are aware of these issues. Media studies is not.40 When the iPad was launched outside the United States in 2010, protesters in Hong Kong burnt photographs of iPhones. Similar demonstrations occurred in India, Mexico, and other offshore assembly sites to protest labor exploitation and environmental despoliation.41 Socalled international communication studies and allied disciplines were deafeningly silent.

A DIFFERENT FUTURE Theoretical and empirical work abounds across the South. From Latin America, consider Ana Rosas Mantecón, Enrique Uribe-Jongbloed, Rosalía Winocur, and Aimée Vega Montiel. From South Asia, think of Ravi Sundaram and Ranjani Mazumdar; from Africa, Achille Mbembe.42 There are of course hundreds of others we might mention. Among the most prominent is Néstor García Canclini, who has made a mark on the study of development, modernization, and globalization; the interaction of the arts of the popular classes with the mainstream; and the relationship of Latin Americans to one another, Europe, and the United States. Canclini’s oeuvre traverses museum visitors and analyses of abstract painting to theories of citizenship versus consumption; prognostications about the future of Latin American life in the world to policy recommendations on the export of film; researching indigenous people’s art to working via the third sector to reform Mexican media regulation. His mixture of theoretical and applied analysis is as interested in the national popular as it is in the avant-garde, as concerned to engage the public as philosophers, and as motivated by indigenous rural concerns as by global urban ones.43 This is Canclini’s case for a truly interdisciplinary analysis of the media: The fusion of multimedia and concentrated media ownership in cultural production correlate[s] with changes in cultural consumption. Therefore macro sociological approaches, which seek to understand the integration of radio, television, music, news, books, and the internet in the fusion of multimedia and business, also need an anthropological gaze, a more qualitative perspective, to comprehend how modes of access, cultural goods, and forms of communication are being reorganized.44 By contrast, empirical, archival, theoretical, and grounded divisions disable the human sciences in their Anglo manifestations. Moribund disciplines remain adrift in the detritus of Cold War professionalism, a warfare-welfare bureaucracy, and service to capital. We must transcend academic and geopolitical borders and their theoretical and methodological barriers in order to find out the nature of things and their interpretability and changeability, rather than pay obeisance at an altar dedicated to reductive understandings and professional parthenogenesis. And we need to view the media through twin theoretical prisms. On the one hand, they are components of sovereignty, cultural additions to patrimony and rights alongside territory, language, history, and schooling. On the other, they are culture industries, and subject to

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the rent-seeking practices, exclusionary representational protocols, and environmental destructiveness that characterize liaisons between state and capital. There is a way for those in the Global North to assist this process, alongside undergoing retraining. Rich schools from those locales have set up exploitative campuses in the Global South designed to recruit wealthy Chinese and Arabic students. Do not do that. Instead, establish nodes in crucial sites of media production and analysis—India, the Philippines, Turkey, Colombia, Brazil, Pakistan, Iran, and others—so you can improve your claims to global media studies. And stop importing the international oligarchy’s offspring to Oxbridge and the Ivy League. A new world of media studies can eschew effortless extrapolations from Anglocentric/ Eurocentric work, once undertaken from worn armchairs, now reinvigorated over sleek laptops. To remain as we are, in our methodological nationalism and monolingualism, is impractical, given the new needs and orientations of our political economy. And it is antiintellectual, given the new opportunities for knowledge that such a revision promises. The future is not English.

NOTES 1 George E. Marcus, Ethnography through Thick and Thin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). 2 Cristina Rojas, Civilization and Violence: Regimes of Representation in Nineteenth-Century Colombia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). 3 Germán Colmenares, “La Formación de la Economía Colonial (1500–1740),” in Historia Económica de Colombia, ed. José Antonio Campo (Bogotá: Tercer Mundo Editores, 1996), 2–22; Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism: 15th-18th Century, vol. 3, The Perspective of the World, trans. Siân Reynolds (London: Collins, 1984). 4 Antonio De Nebrija, “On Language and Empire: The Prologue to Grammar of the Castilian Language (1492),” trans. Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra, PMLA 131.1 (2016): 197–208. 5 Paul Felix Lazarsfeld, “Remarks on Administrative and Critical Communications Research,” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9 (1941): 2–16. 6 Toby Miller, “Política Cultural/Industrias Creativas,” trans. Laura Victoria Navas, Cuadernos de Literatura 31 (2012): 17–38. 7 Hardt Hanno, “Comparative Media Research: The World According to America,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 5.2 (1984): 129–46. 8 Jo Ellen Fair and Shah Hemant “Continuities and Discontinuities in Communication and Development Research since 1958,” Journal of International Communication 4.2 (1997): 3–23. 9 Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (New York: Free Press, 1958); Wilbur Schramm, Mass Media and National Development: The Role of Information in the Developing World (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964). 10 Alfred Sauvy, “Trois Mondes, Une Planète,” L’Observateur, August 14, 1952, 14. 11 Benedict Anderson, A Life beyond Boundaries: A Memoir (London: Verso, 2016); David H. Price, Cold War Anthropology: The CIA, the Pentagon, and the Growth of Dual Use of Anthropology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); Christopher Simpson, Science of Coercion: Communication Research & Psychological Warfare, 1945–1960 (New York: Open Road, 2014). 12 Thomas Hanitzsch, “Journalism Studies Still Needs to Fix Western Bias,” Journalism 20.1 (2019): 214–17. 13 Jesús Arroyave, “Journalism in America,” in The Routledge Handbook to the Culture and Media of the Americas, eds. Wilfried Raussert, Giselle Liza Anatol, Sebastian Thies, Sarah Corona Berkin, and José Carlos Lozano (New York: Routledge, 2020), 353–63.

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14 Fernanda Beigel, “David y Goliath: El Sistema Académico Mundial y las Perspectivas del Conocimiento Producido en la Periferia,” Pensamiento Universitario 5 (2013): 1–18; Sébastien Mosbah-Natanson and Yves Gingras, “The Globalization of Social Sciences? Evidence from a Quantitative Analysis of 30 Years of Production, Collaboration and Citations in the Social Sciences (1980–2009),” Current Sociology 62.5 (2014): 626–46; Marton Demeter, “So Far, Yet So Close: International Career Paths of Communication Scholars from the Global South,” International Journal of Communication 13 (2019): 578–602. 15 Society for Cinema and Media Studies, “Officers,” SCMS (n.d.), https://www.cmstudies.org/page/ officers?page=board#. 16 Society for Cinema and Media Studies, “SCS/SCMS Presidential Biographies,” SCMS (n.d.), https:// www.cmstudies.org/page/past_presidents. 17 International Communication Association, “Past Presidents,” ICA (n.d.), https://www.icahdq.org/ page/PastPresidents. 18 International Association for Media and Communication Research, “Challenges after 1990,” IAMCR (n.d.), https://iamcr.org/in-retrospect/challenges-after-1990. 19 Suresh A. Canagarajah, A Geopolitics of Academic Writing (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002). 20 International Communication Association, “Journal of Communication Editorial Board,” Oxford Academic (n.d.), https://academic.oup.com/joc/pages/Editorial_Board. 21 Society for Cinema and Media Studies, “Editors and Editorial Board,” SCMS (n.d.), https://www. cmstudies.org/page/editors_ed_board. 22 C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956). 23 Nathan Walter, Michael Cody, and Sandra Ball-Rokeach, “The Ebb and Flow of Communication Research: Seven Decades of Publication Trends and Research Priorities,” Journal of Communication 68.2 (2018): 424–40. 24 Mosbah-Natanson and Gingras, “The Globalization of Social Sciences?” 25 Marton Demeter, “The Winner Takes It All: International Inequality in Communication and Media Studies Today,” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 96.1 (2019b): 37–59. 26 Ibid. 27 Edmund Lauf, “National Diversity of Major International Journals in the Field of Communication,” Journal of Communication 55.1 (2005): 139–51. 28 Raúl Prebisch, The Crisis of Capitalism and the Periphery: 1st Raúl Prebisch Lecture, Geneva: United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, 1982; Fernando Henrique Cardoso, “New Paths: Globalization in Historical Perspective,” Studies in Comparative International Development 44.4 (2009): 296–317. 29 Luis Ramiro Beltrán, “Communication and Cultural Domination: US-Latin America Case,” Media Asia 5 (1978): 183–92. 30 Linje Manyozo, “Manifesto for Development Communication: Nora Quebral and the Los Baños School of Development Communication,” Asian Journal of Communication 16.1 (2006): 79–99; Jenny Segoviana García, “Dialéctica de la Ilustración y sus Aportaciones al Estudio de los Medios Masivos,” Razón y Palabra 75 (2011), http://www.razonypalabra.org.mx/N/N75/ monotematico_75/34_Segoviano_M75.pdf; Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, Para leer al pato Donald (Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Universitarias de Valparaíso, 1971). 31 Arun Kumar Patnaik, “Gramsci Today,” Economic & Political Weekly, March 13–19, 2004, 1120–23;Hamid Dabashi, “Can Non-Europeans Think?” Aljazeera, January 15, 2013, http://www. aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/01/2013114142638797542.html;Shula Marks and Dagmar Engels, eds., Contesting Colonial Hegemony: State and Society in Africa and India (New York: I.B.Tauris, 1994). 32 Jaime Massardo, “La Recepción de Gramsci en America Latina: Cuestiones de Orden Teórico y Político,” International Gramsci Society Newsletter 9: electronic supplement 3 (1999), http://www. internationalgramscisociety.org/igsn/articles/a09_s3.shtml.

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33 Rodrigo Santofimio-Ortiz, “El Pensamiento de Antonio Gramsci en América Latina y Colombia,” Revista de Antropología y Sociología: VIRAJES 20.1 (2018): 177–96; Hal Brands, Latin America’s Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 17 34 TACNA, “Advantages of Manufacturing in Mexico vs China,” TACNA (n.d.), https://tacna.net/ manufacturing-in-mexico/difference-vs-china/. 35 Homero Martínez-Siraitare, “Television Manufacturing in Tijuana is King,” Tecma, May 29, 2015, https://www.tecma.com/television-manufacturing-in-tijuana/. 36 Elisabeth Malkin, “A Boom along the Border,” New York Times, August 26, 2004, http://www. nytimes.com/2004/08/26/business/a-boom-along-the-border.html. 37 Solidatidad.tv. “Maquilas en México: Abuso y Explotación Laboral,” YouTube, January 9, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPWLBuOp8GA. 38 William Hillyard, “Where Is ‘Away’?” Real Change, December 31, 2009, http://realchangenews. org/2009/12/31/where-away. 39 Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller, Greening the Media (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 40 Jack Linchuan Qiu, Goodbye iSlave: A Manifesto for Digital Abolition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016). 41 David Barboza, “Supply Chain for iPhone Highlights Costs in China,” New York Times July 5, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/06/technology/06iphone.html?pagewanted=all; Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour, “Workers as Machines: Military Management in Foxconn,” (2010), https://www.somo.nl/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/military-management-in-Foxconn.pdf. 42 Jesús Martín-Barbero, “Between Technology and Culture: Communication and Modernity in Latin America,” in Cultural Agency in the Americas, ed. Doris Sommer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 37–51; Alejandro Barranquero Carretero, Carlos Arcila Calderón, and Jesús Arroyave Cabrera, Manual de Teoría de la Comunicación: II, Pensamientos Latinoamericanos (Barranquilla: Editorial Universidad del Norte, 2017); Sergio Roncallo-Dow, Edward Goyeneche-Gómez, and Enrique Uribe-Jongbloed, Volver a los Clásicos: Teorías de la Comunicación y Cultura Pop (Bogotá: Universidad de La Sabana/Uniediciones, 2016); Ana Rosas Mantecón, Ir al Cine: Antropología de los Públicos, la Ciudad y las Pantallas (Mexico City: Gedisa/UAM, 2017); Aimée Vega Montiel, “Intersections between Feminism and the Political Economy of Communication: Women’s Access to and Participation in Mexico’s Media Industries,” Feminist Media Studies 12.2 (2012): 310–16; Ravi Sundaram, Pirate Modernity: Delhi’s Media Urbanism (London: Routledge, 2010); Ranjani Mazumdar, Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Achille Mbembe, Critique de la Raison Nègre (Paris: Editions La Découverte, 2013). 43 Toby Miller, “Néstor García Canclini and Communication Studies,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication, March 2018, https://oxfordre.com/communication/view/10.1093/ acrefore/9780190228613.001.0001/acrefore-9780190228613-e–594; Néstor García Canclini, “Interview for the 9th Spanish Sociology Conference, 2007,” trans. Toby Miller, Social Identities 14.3 (2008): 389–94. 44 Néstor García Canclini, “Interview for the 9th Spanish Sociology Conference, 2007.”

WORKS CITED Anderson, Benedict. A Life beyond Boundaries: A Memoir. London: Verso, 2016. Arroyave, Jesús. “Journalism in America.” In The Routledge Handbook to the Culture and Media of the Americas. Ed. Wilfried Raussert, Giselle Liza Anatol, Sebastian Thies, Sarah Corona Berkin, and José Carlos Lozano. New York: Routledge, 2020. 353–63. Barboza, David. “Supply Chain for iPhone Highlights Costs in China.” New York Times, July 5, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/06/technology/06iphone.html?pagewanted=all. Barranquero Carretero, Alejandro, Carlos Arcila Calderón, and Jesús Arroyave Cabrera. Manual de Teoría de la Comunicación: II. Pensamientos Latinoamericanos. Barranquilla: Editorial Universidad del Norte; Bogotá: Ediciones de la U, 2017.

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Beigel, Fernanda. “David y Goliath: El Sistema Académico Mundial y las Perspectivas del Conocimiento Producido en la Periferia.” Pensamiento Universitario 5 (2013): 1–18. Beltrán, Luis Ramiro. “Communication and Cultural Domination: US-Latin America Case,” Media Asia 5 (1978): 183–92. Brands, Hal. Latin America’s Cold War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Braudel, Fernand. Civilization and Capitalism: 15th-18th Century. Vol. 3, The Perspective of the World. Trans. Siân Reynolds. London: Collins, 1984. Canagarajah, Suresh A. A Geopolitics of Academic Writing. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002. Cardoso, Fernando Henrique. “New Paths: Globalization in Historical Perspective.” Studies in Comparative International Development 44.4 (2009): 296–317. Colmenares, Germán. “La Formación de la Economía Colonial (1500-1740).” In Historia Económica de Colombia. Ed. José Antonio Campo. Bogotá: Tercer Mundo Editores, 1996. 2–22. Dabashi, Hamid. “Can Non-Europeans Think?” Aljazeera, January 15, 2013. http://www.aljazeera. com/indepth/opinion/2013/01/2013114142638797542.html. de Nebrija, Antonio. “On Language and Empire: The Prologue to Grammar of the Castilian Language (1492).” Trans. Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra. PMLA 131.1 (2016): 197–208. Demeter, Marton. “So Far, Yet So Close: International Career Paths of Communication Scholars from the Global South.” International Journal of Communication 13 (2019a): 578–602. Demeter, Marton. “The Winner Takes It All: International Inequality in Communication and Media Studies Today.” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 96.1 (2019b): 37–59. Dorfman, Ariel, and Armand Mattelart. Para leer al pato Donald. Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Universitarias de Valparaíso, 1971. Fair, Jo Ellen, and Hemant Shah. “Continuities and Discontinuities in Communication and Development Research since 1958.” Journal of International Communication 4.2 (1997): 3–23. García Canclini, Néstor. “Interview for the 9th Spanish Sociology Conference, 2007.” Trans. Toby Miller. Social Identities 14.3 (2008): 389–94. García Canclini, Néstor, Francisco Cruces, and Maritza Urteaga Castro Pozo. Eds. Jóvenes, culturas urbanas y redes digitales. Mexico City: Ariel/Fundación Telefónica/Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 2012. Hanitzsch, Thomas. “Journalism Studies Still Needs to Fix Western Bias.” Journalism 20.1 (2019): 214–17. Hardt, Hanno. “Comparative Media Research: The World According to America.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 5.2 (1984): 129–46. Hillyard, William. “Where Is ‘Away’?” Real Change (December 31, 2009). http://realchangenews. org/2009/12/31/where-away. International Association for Media and Communication Research. “Challenges After 1990.” IAMCR (n.d.). https://iamcr.org/in-retrospect/challenges-after-1990. International Communication Association. “Journal of Communication Editorial Board.” Oxford Academic (n.d.). https://academic.oup.com/joc/pages/Editorial_Board. International Communication Association. “Past Presidents.” ICA (n.d.). https://www.icahdq.org/page/ PastPresidents. Lauf, Edmund. “National Diversity of Major International Journals in the Field of Communication.” Journal of Communication 55.1 (2005): 139–51. Lazarsfeld, Paul Felix. “Remarks on Administrative and Critical Communications Research.” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9 (1941): 2–16. Lerner, Daniel. The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East. New York: Free Press, 1958. Malkin, Elisabeth. “A Boom along the Border.” New York Times, August 26, 2004. http://www. nytimes.com/2004/08/26/business/a-boom-along-the-border.html. Mantecón, Ana Rosas. Ir al Cine: Antropología de los Públicos, la Ciudad y las Pantallas. Mexico City: Gedisa/UAM, 2017. Manyozo, Linje. “Manifesto for Development Communication: Nora Quebral and the Los Baños School of Development Communication.” Asian Journal of Communication 16.1 (2006): 79–99. Marcus, George E. Ethnography Through Thick and Thin. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.

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Marks, Shula, and Dagmar Engels, eds. Contesting Colonial Hegemony: State and Society in Africa and India. New York: I.B. Tauris, 1994. Martín-Barbero, Jesús. “Between Technology and Culture: Communication and Modernity in Latin America.” In Cultural Agency in the Americas. Ed. Doris Sommer. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. 37–51. Martínez-Siraitare, Homero. “Television Manufacturing in Tijuana Is King.” Tecma, May 29, 2015. https://www.tecma.com/television-manufacturing-in-tijuana/. Massardo, Jaime. “La Recepción de Gramsci en America Latina: Cuestiones de Orden Teórico y Político,” International Gramsci Society Newsletter 9: electronic supplement 3 (1999). http://www. internationalgramscisociety.org/igsn/articles/a09_s3.shtml. Maxwell, Richard, and Toby Miller. Greening the Media. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Mazumdar, Ranjani. Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Mbembe, Achille. Critique de la Raison Nègre. Paris: Editions La Découverte, 2013. Miller, Toby. “Néstor García Canclini and Communication Studies.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication (March 2018). https://oxfordre.com/communication/view/10.1093/ acrefore/9780190228613.001.0001/acrefore-9780190228613-e-594. Miller, Toby. “Política Cultural/Industrias Creativas.” Trans. Laura Victoria Navas. Cuadernos de Literatura 31 (2012): 17–38. Mills, C. Wright. The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press, 1956. Mosbah-Natanson, Sébastien, and Yves Gingras. “The Globalization of Social Sciences? Evidence from a Quantitative Analysis of 30 Years of Production, Collaboration and Citations in the Social Sciences (1980-2009).” Current Sociology 62.5 (2014): 626–46. Patnaik, Arun Kumar. “Gramsci Today.” Economic & Political Weekly (March 13–19, 2004): 1120–23. Prebisch, Raúl. The Crisis of Capitalism and the Periphery: 1st Raúl Prebisch Lecture. Geneva: United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, 1982. Price, David H. Cold War Anthropology: The CIA, the Pentagon, and the Growth of Dual Use of Anthropology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Qiu, Jack Linchuan. Goodbye iSlave: A Manifesto for Digital Abolition. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016. Rojas, Cristina. Civilization and Violence: Regimes of Representation in Nineteenth-Century Colombia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Roncallo-Dow, Sergio, Edward Goyeneche-Gómez, and Enrique Uribe-Jongbloed. Volver a los Clásicos: Teorías de la Comunicación y Cultura Pop. Bogotá: Universidad de La Sabana/ Uniediciones, 2016. Santofimio-Ortiz, Rodrigo. “El Pensamiento de Antonio Gramsci en América Latina y Colombia.” Revista de Antropología y Sociología: VIRAJES 20.1 (2018): 177–96. Sauvy, Alfred. “Trois Mondes, Une Planète.” L’Observateur August 14, 1952, 14. Schramm, Wilbur. Mass Media and National Development: The Role of Information in the Developing World. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964. Segoviana García, Jenny. “Dialéctica de la Ilustración y sus Aportaciones al Estudio de los Medios Masivos.” Razón y Palabra 75 (2011). http://www.razonypalabra.org.mx/N/N75/ monotematico_75/34_Segoviano_M75.pdf. Simpson, Christopher. Science of Coercion: Communication Research & Psychological Warfare, 19451960. New York: Open Road, 2014. Society for Cinema and Media Studies. “Editors and Editorial Board.” SCMS (n.d.). https://www. cmstudies.org/page/editors_ed_board. Society for Cinema and Media Studies. “Officers.” SCMS (n.d.). https://www.cmstudies.org/page/ officers?page=board#. Society for Cinema and Media Studies. “SCS/SCMS Presidential Biographies.” SCMS (n.d.). https:// www.cmstudies.org/page/past_presidents. Solidatidad.tv. “Maquilas en México: Abuso y Explotación Laboral.” YouTube January 9, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPWLBuOp8GA. Students and Scholars against Corporate Misbehaviour. “Workers as Machines: Military Management in Foxconn.” 2010. https://www.somo.nl/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/military-management-inFoxconn.pdf.

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Sundaram, Ravi. Pirate Modernity: Delhi’s Media Urbanism. London: Routledge, 2010. TACNA. “Advantages of Manufacturing in Mexico vs China.” TACNA (n.d.). https://tacna.net/ manufacturing-in-mexico/difference-vs-china/. Vega Montiel, Aimée. “Intersections Between Feminism and the Political Economy of Communication: Women’s Access to and Participation in Mexico’s Media Industries.” Feminist Media Studies 12.2 (2012): 310–16. Walter, Nathan, Michael Cody, and Sandra Ball-Rokeach. “The Ebb and Flow of Communication Research: Seven Decades of Publication Trends and Research Priorities.” Journal of Communication 68.2 (2018): 424–40. Winocur, Rosalía. Ciudadanos Mediáticos: La Construcción de lo Publico en la Radio. Barcelona: Editorial Gedisa, 2002.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Worlding Journalism VERA SLAVTCHEVA-PETKOVA

Journalism studies has been one of the fastest growing fields of academic inquiry in the last few decades. The launching and success of most of the top journalism academic journals and the proliferation of university degree programs in journalism around the world are a clear indication of this fact. But is journalism studies a truly global field of academic inquiry? What is the geographic scope of the top research publications in this area of study? Are there any overriding theories or theory that are universally applicable and define the field as such? Can we claim that a process of “worlding” journalism has indeed taken place or is likely to take place any time soon? This chapter tackles these questions by first briefly reviewing the main claims made about the global nature of journalism studies (or lack thereof) in the academic literature and by then presenting the results of a study exploring the geographical scope, methods, and theories used in 664 journal articles published in six journalism journals in 2019 and 2020.

IS JOURNALISM STUDIES A GLOBAL FIELD OF INQUIRY? While journalism is practiced and studied as a subject around the world, it is undeniable that as an academic field of inquiry, journalism studies has not achieved global scope in terms of the geographic regions covered or indeed the theories used. While some efforts have been made in that direction by journal editors and top scholars in the field, as Thomas Hanitzsch has argued, “journalism studies is still struggling with the consequences of a continued Western hegemony in the way we approach and understand journalism on a global scale.”1 In his view, the quantity of non-Western research has increased in the past twenty-five years, but “its qualitative impact on the field is still relatively minor” because “the studies we typically consider groundbreaking or field-defining were authored by scholars from the West.”2 According to Hanitzsch, “US scholarship still reigns supreme when it comes to defining key areas of inquiry (such as ‘fake news’ and verification, most recently) and to directing the field in theoretical, epistemological, and methodological terms.”3 A range of obstacles prevents scholars from the Global South from putting their foot in the door or indeed making a stronger contribution to the field. The main ones are structural, namely the high level of economic inequality and uneven distribution of resources worldwide as well as the lack of proper research infrastructure and, as a consequence, cultural capital and the dominance of English as the lingua franca of academic publishing. A key issue that Hanitzsch identified and this study also confirms is that “Western researchers often take it for granted that their work is relevant to readers around the world, while researchers from non-Western contexts often have to defend their choice of countries

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and country-specific literatures.”4 Although profoundly unfair, this is hardly surprising, given the history of journalism studies as a discipline in terms of its birth and development as an academic subject and corresponding theorization. Journalism education was born in the United States in 1865, with France following suit and setting up its own instruction in this field in 1899. The twentieth century saw a proliferation of journalism programs around the world, but the US model of journalism with its inherent ideology of liberal values, including freedom of expression, has clearly dominated. Thus, the majority of journalism programs in Africa, for instance, follow the American model. As Beate Josephy argued, “no other country has had a similar impact on the discipline, and the United States’ pioneering role has shaped curricula around the world.”5 In terms of theory building, journalism studies has arguably not really developed a set of concepts and theories unique to the discipline but has instead borrowed conceptual tools and frameworks from other disciplines such as sociology, political science, cultural studies, history, language studies, philosophy, and economics.6 Steen Steensen and Laura Ahva’s review of journal articles published in the top two journalism journals, Journalism and Journalism Studies, has revealed that “journalism studies is dominated by an increasing variety of theoretical approaches.”7 They counted over 100 theories in 195 abstracts. Nonetheless, what a lot of these theories and concepts have in common is a normative liberal underpinning. As Michael Bromley and Vera SlavtchevaPetkova have argued, liberal theory is to a large extent the dominant paradigm in journalism studies. At the core of normative liberal theory is the belief in the value of democracy and of freedom of expression as a fundamental human right. The nineteenth-century English philosopher John Stuart Mill (1859) offered one of the first and most famous defenses of freedom of speech in his essay On Liberty (1859/2001). He wrote: If the arguments of the present chapter are of any validity, there ought to exist the fullest liberty of professing and discussing, as a matter of ethical conviction, any doctrine, however immoral it may be considered.8 Sweden was the first country in the world to have freedom of the press written into its constitution in 1766. The best-known legal guarantee for freedom of expression is, however, the First Amendment of the US Constitution from 1791, which states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Freedom of expression is also enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights and the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights as well as in most countries’ constitutions. However, the legal guarantee itself does not necessarily translate into practices on the ground but is yet another example of an agenda driven by liberal values from the Global North, which is actively imposed on the Global South in a very top-down manner but not necessarily internalized by the respective societies. As Bromley and Slavtcheva-Petkova explained, the liberal norm reflected a wider liberal theory, more specifically process-oriented democracy which was based in part on “enlightened understanding” facilitated by freedom of expression and plural sources of information … This form of democracy ideally guaranteed the right to ongoing public debate, transparency and accountability in which governance (historically, by the feudal estates of the monarchy/aristocracy, established religion and

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restricted commons) was held in check by the Fourth Estate to deliver on recognised (often “natural”) rights and liberties.9 This understanding of news media as the fourth estate is built on the wider understanding of democracy as the only viable form of governance with a clear separation between the three main branches of power—the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary. Given that this system only works if proper processes of checks and balances are established, journalists have a major role to play in terms of holding the powerful to account. As Hanitzsch put it, “grounded in a liberal pluralist view, journalism is seen as essential to the creation and maintenance of participatory democracy. Acting as Fourth Estate alongside the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of power, this understanding assumes that the news media are independent of the state and that journalists are autonomous agents who represent the people.”10 This allegedly intrinsic link between democracy and freedom of expression and the presumed fourth estate/watchdog role news media and journalists should play is what has guided journalism education throughout the world and has informed much journalism research as well. This link, however, is deeply problematic. First, as the last press freedom index published by the US nongovernmental organization Freedom House showed, the majority of people in the world did not live in countries with free media in 2017. Only 13 percent did. As Barbie Zelizer has argued, “scholarship on journalism has long privileged a journalistic world that is narrower than that which resides on the ground.”11 She even called for “a retirement of the concept” of democracy “as a key term for understanding journalism.”12 In her view, “while one might argue that journalism has been historically necessary for democracy, the opposite assertion does not hold to the same degree. In fact, circumstances show that democracy has not been necessary for journalism, and the idea that democracy is the lifeline of journalism has not been supported on the ground.”13 Zelizer even claimed that this focus on democracy has led to the privileging of “those journalisms most germane to the core of democratic theory” to the extent that “the centrality of democracy has generated undemocratic journalism scholarship.”14 Second, even in democratic countries, the media are not always fully free but experience a wide range of challenges that limit the work of journalists and their ability to act as the fourth estate. Political partisanship and bias have long plagued journalists’ strife toward and claims about objectivity as being the core value that guides their work. Even a perfunctory look at developments in Europe in recent years shows some of the ongoing issues—from the problematic links between politicians, business interests, and the media with the most extreme example coming from Silvio Berlusconi’s terms in office as Prime Minister of Italy to the phone hacking scandal in the UK and the rise of populist leaders in Central and Eastern Europe who are putting multiple pressures on journalists and are generally trying to limit press freedom. Furthermore, objectivity, although taught as the norm in journalism education and training, is actually a widely contested concept in itself. Third, not all journalists think that they should be detached watchdogs, neither does this role orientation necessarily serve the needs of all societies. Thus, in many Asian and African countries, development journalism is endorsed by the majority of journalists. The term was first coined in 1968 at a training course for economic writers in Asia. Development journalism promotes collaboration between the state and the media with the aim of mobilizing “the population for socio-economic development,”15 which usually includes the active promotion of positive news. African leaders considered the media to be a key partner in the process of

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liberation from colonialism and in the rebuilding of African societies in the postcolonial era. Similarly, in Asia, the argument is made that development journalism is better suited for the needs of collectivist societies than watchdog journalism, and that there is a place for so-called Asian-values journalism, which is a form of development journalism. Needless to say, critics of this approach see it as another form of editorial interference and even censorship and repression.16 These criticisms of development journalism do not preclude journalists from perceiving supporting national development as the main role that they should be playing, as the Worlds of Journalism study showed. The Worlds of Journalism study is a groundbreaking research project founded by Hanitzsch, which includes a cross-national collaboration of researchers from more than 110 countries in the third wave (2021–23). In the second wave, over 27,500 journalists took part in representative surveys in 67 countries. Supporting national development was seen as a key role for the majority of journalists in all nine African countries that took part in the survey.17 A similar trend was evident in Asia, although it was not as pronounced, and it did not include all Asian countries. Notable exceptions were Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, and South Korea. Also as part of the Worlds of Journalism’s study second wave, an open-ended question asked journalists what the three most important roles for them were. While being a watchdog was the second top role, the percentage of journalists who made a reference to that role was actually not that high—8.1 percent.18 Moreover, as Olivier Standaert, Hanitzsch, and Jonathan Dedonder pointed out, While Western journalism cultures broadly coalesce around a quartet of roles including the informer, watchdog, monitor, and entertainer, the situation is slightly different in many non-Western countries. In these societies, journalists perceive the four roles mentioned above as somewhat less relevant, and they tend to blend them with other roles, such as the opinion guide, change agent, people’s voice, and missionary.19 The watchdog role was the most important one for journalists in the United States and the UK, and the second most important one for their colleagues in Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and Australia. Standaert, Hanitzsch, and Dedonder even concluded that “this role is clearly an identity marker of an Anglo-Saxon journalism culture.”20 Finally, accepting liberalism and liberal theory as the norm in journalism studies significantly diminishes our potential to draw a powerful link between practice and theory, and to understand journalism in its multiple contexts. This approach is highly reductive and ultimately limits our ability to build theory/theories and contribute to knowledge, policy, and practice. Internationalization has too often meant imposing Western concepts and theories on the rest of the world and seeing journalism as “more stable, more morally unambiguous, less contingent, more socially useful, less corrupt, and, most importantly, more aligned with western notions of democracy than it ever could be on the ground.”21 As Hanitzsch argued, “Western cultures of journalism, and particularly the news media in the United States, have become the prism through which we have constructed normality with respect to how we understand journalism globally … This approach privileges liberal democracy and individuality, which may be different from norms that exist elsewhere as exemplified by the debate over the value of development journalism.”22 As Bromley and Slavtcheva-Petkova have pointed out, “normative theories of journalism, therefore, may be more useful as heuristic tools providing a basic outline of practical societal expectations rather than as abstract prescriptions for journalism’s role,”23 and even that approach might not work worldwide because of the differences in contexts, societal needs, and expectations. A key aspect of the

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process of worlding journalism research should, therefore, be a drive toward moving away from normative liberal theory and what is advocated as being “normal” in the Global North in cases when it is not fully applicable or does not allow us to understand the respective developments on the ground.

CURRENT STATE OF RESEARCH What is the current state of journalism research in terms of geographic scope of the studies conducted, the authors of published research, and the theories used in these studies? Stephen Cushion’s review of the articles published in Journalism and Journalism Studies in the period 2000–07 showed that 48.6 percent of the articles in Journalism and 37.6 percent of the ones published in Journalism Studies were from US-based researchers, followed by UK researchers with 20.5 percent and 18.7 percent, respectively. Similarly, US journalism was the focus of the biggest percentage of articles—43.8 percent in Journalism and 27.7 percent in Journalism Studies, followed by UK journalism with 18.9 percent and 24.3 percent, respectively. Folker Hanusch and Tim Vos’s systematic review of 441 comparative studies of journalism published in 22 key journals between 2000 and 2015 showed a “continuing focus on Western authorship, the study of Western countries and elite media, quantitative methods of analysis and political aspects of journalism.”24 The study revealed that nearly four of every five articles were authored by researchers based in Western countries with a third of the articles written by researchers from the US, followed by the UK. Moreover, over the fifteen-year period under study, “there has not been a discernible shift toward the inclusion of non-Western countries in comparative research, somewhat contradicting the argument that the most recent period in comparative journalism studies is more global in nature.”25 This study shows that not much has changed in journalism research in the past few years. It includes a content analysis of 664 articles published from January 1, 2019, until May 31, 2020, in six journalism journals: Journalism, Digital Journalism, Journalism Studies, Journalism Practice, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, and African Journalism Studies. The sample included all journals with the word “journalism” in their title, which were ranked by Clarivate Analytics Journal Citation Reports and included in the Communication category. Other journals also publish journalism research, but it made sense to focus on the ones that are explicitly and solely dedicated to this field of inquiry. The time frame selected was aimed at providing a snapshot of the most recent trends in journalism scholarship across a range of publications. The aim of the study was to establish whether and to what extent the field of journalism studies has developed a truly global outlook by focusing on three key aspects: (1) countries studied, (2) authors’ institutional affiliation by country, and (3) theories used. The coding was based on the information provided in both the abstract and the actual article. The most difficult category was “theories used” because although theories and concepts were often mentioned in the abstracts, they were not really developed or used in any way whatsoever in the main body of the article.

COUNTRIES STUDIED The geographical distribution of the countries studied in the articles published in the six journalism journals shows a clear dominance of the United States (Table 25.1). 35.4 percent of all empirical studies were about the United States, followed by 12.1 percent

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Table 25.1  Top Ten Countries Studied Country

Percentage

United States

35.4

UK

12.1

Germany

8.3

The Netherlands

4

Sweden

4

Norway

3.6

Australia

3.2

Belgium

2.5

Finland

2.5

Spain

2.5

Note: The percentages do not add up to 100 percent because some studies covered more than one country.

about the UK. Thus, nearly half of all articles covered these two countries. Although in total seventy-two countries were studied, 69.4 percent were covered in five articles or fewer and a third were studied in only one article. The other three countries in the top five were all rich Western and North European countries. No countries from the Global South were in the top ten, but 21.9 percent of all empirical studies included Global South countries (Figure 25.1). One positive trend is the reasonably high number of studies (5.9 percent of all empirical studies) that were multinational, namely more than six countries were studied in them. The breakdown by journal (Table 25.2) shows that the largest percentage of articles about the United States was published in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly (nearly six in ten articles)—the flagship journal of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC). The other journals with the exception of African Journalism Studies—Journalism, Digital Journalism, Journalism Studies, and Journalism Practice—also had a much larger proportion of articles about the United States than about any other country. Overall, Europe and North America attracted a disproportionately higher interest than the rest of the world. The trend of US/UK dominance is even more pronounced when investigating the institutional affiliation of the authors by country. 36.7 percent of all studies were authored by academics based in the United States, followed by 14.6 percent by UK researchers (Table 25.3). Thus, over half of all articles originated from these two countries. 86.1 percent of the articles by US scholars were about the United States, while 68.1 percent of the articles by UK scholars were about the UK. This shows that US researchers were much more likely to study the country they were based in than the UK researchers. In total, academics publishing in the six ranked journalism journals were institutionally based in sixty different countries, but scholars from 63.3 percent of these countries authored five articles or fewer; 31.7 percent of the countries covered were mentioned in one article only. The percentage of representation of the Global South was lower than in terms of the countries studied—16.3 percent (Figure 25.2).

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Table 25.2  Countries Studied by Journal (in percent) Journal

North America

Latin America

Europe

Asia

Africa

Australia

Journalism

27.3

1.5

52.3

6.8

2.3

3.8

Digital Journalism

30.6

4.1

43.9

6.1

6.1

3.1

Journalism Studies

23.7

1.3

50.9

12.9

2.6

5.2

Journalism Practice

37.5

2.2

40.4

10.3

2.2

3

Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly

58.5

0

18.9

9.4

3.8

0

African Journalism Studies

0

0

0

0

100

0

Note: The percentages do not add up to 100 percent because studies including more than six countries were counted as a separate category—multinational.

Table 25.3  Authors’ Institutional Affiliation by Top Ten Countries (in percent) Country

All articles

USA

36.7

UK

14.6

Germany

7.1

The Netherlands

6.6

Norway

6.1

Australia

5.2

Sweden

3.9

Belgium

3.7

Singapore

2.7

Switzerland

2.2

Note: The percentages do not add up to 100 percent because some articles were coauthored by academics from more than one country.

Table 25.4  Authors’ Institutional Affiliation by Journal and Region (in percent) Journal

North America

Latin America

Europe

Asia

Africa

Australia

Journalism

28.7

1.5

56.3

8

1

4.5

Digital Journalism

32.3

1.6

52.7

7.1

1.6

4.7

Journalism Studies

26.9

1.7

52.1

9.7

2.5

7.1

Journalism Practice

36.4

3.3

44.1

9.1

1.9

5.2

Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly

57.1

1.6

23.8

15.9

1.6

0

African Journalism Studies

14.8

0

22.2

0

59.3

3.7

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The breakdown by journal based on authors’ institutional affiliation shows (see right above) an even more pronounced dominance of US and European scholars than the breakdown by journal based on countries studied. Over half of the articles in the top three journalism journals were authored by European academics, and slightly less than a third by US scholars. African and Asian scholars were severely underrepresented, and even 37 percent of the articles in African Journalism Studies were authored by US and European academics.

THEORIES USED As previous studies concluded, there is a vast array of theories used in journalism studies. In their review of the literature, Steensen and Ahva counted more than 100 different theories in use from fields such as political science, sociology, language, and critical studies. Close to 200 different theoretical frameworks from a range of disciplines were identified in the 664 studies published in the six journalism journals that this study focused on. A lot of them—roughly a third—did not actually use any theories. Although the majority mentioned some concepts and/or theories, they did not make a genuine attempt to apply, test, or refine them. There were only a few frameworks that were used in more than twenty studies, but each of them constituted a very small percentage of the total number of articles (