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The Literary History of World-Systems, I: Marxist Lineages

Matthew Eatough*
Baruch College, CUNY

Abstract

This essay is the first of a two-part series on the use of world-systems theory in literary studies. It argues
that the recent popularity of world-systems theory among literary scholars has raised important questions
about how we practice literary history. Appeals to a more global configuration of world literary space
seem to promise a more inclusive literary history, but world-systems theorys expansive focus also clashes
with literary studies traditional definitions of cultural activity. In order to investigate this tension, the essay
begins by examining the birth of world-systems theory. It shows how world-systems theory grew out of a
number of intersecting currents in academic scholarship, including Marxist economics, dependista theory,
and Annales historiography. The essay then proceeds to trace literary studies' earliest engagements with
world-systems theory. As I show, these initial engagements took place within two distinct critical
traditions: (1) in the Subaltern Studies project, which diagnosed intellectual production as an effect of
the global division of labor; and (2) in Jamesonian Marxism, which attempted to map literature onto
the world-system under the aegis of a leftist Hegelianism. The essay concludes by analyzing how these
projects have helped to redefine the nature of the relationship between literary production and economic
systems.

In their introduction to the volume Immanuel Wallerstein and the Problem of the World, David
Palumbo-Lui, Bruce Robbins, and Nirvana Tanoukhi sum up the ambivalence literary critics
have felt toward world-systems theory. On the one hand, the concept of a world-system would
seem, in their words, to satisfy our own most fervent inclinations for greater inclusiveness and
conceptual reform (4). This inclination was a prime motivation behind world-systems theorys
earliest articulations, which sought to answer a deceptively simple question: why, when
postcolonial nations were modernizing their economic institutions and infrastructure at a
breakneck pace, did they seem to be continually falling further and further behind Western
nations? For such noted historians as Immanuel Wallerstein (19742011), Andre Gunder Frank
(1969; 1998), Giovanni Arrighi (1994), Samir Amin (1976), and Janet Abu-Lughod, the only
way to explain this continued disparity was to shift ones attention away from these nations
themselves and onto the structure of the world economy. By taking the world economy as a single
unit of analysis, these scholars argued, one could see how inequality was produced within the
very trade networks connecting Western and postcolonial states together inequalities that
remained invisible when looking at the nation alone (Wallerstein 1974, 15). For those literary
critics who have adopted a world-systems perspective, the goal has been much the same: to show
how a more abstract, structuralist model of world literary space might be able to uncover hitherto
unnoticed inequalities within the production and reception of culture. Indeed, if Euro-American
criticism has long excluded a majority of the worlds creative products under the questionable
rubric of great [read: Western] works, the more global approach offered by world-systems
theory, so goes the argument, might be able to place Western and non-Western literatures into
a more meaningful dialogue. Only by broadening our perspective to as large of a field as possible
can we hope to escape the ethnocentric bias that seems so endemic to literary history.
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On the other hand, however, the social scientific foundation upon which world-systems
theory was built also poses something of a disciplinary problem for literary studies. As
Palumbo-Lui, Robbins, and Tanoukhi point out, Wallersteins work tends to relegate culture
to a subordinate, politically reactionary role (5). Because social justice demands reform on a
structural level, attempts to liberate ones self, class, or country through cultural means are more
likely to mystify the underlying causes of socioeconomic inequality than to spur change.
Cultural products are symptomatic of structural conditions, but they are not those conditions
themselves; and confusing the two, at least in Wallersteins mind, risks substituting effect for
cause and thereby misunderstanding the very nature of structural inequality.
Of course, one might broaden ones critical lens in hope of discovering a cultural system
running parallel to the more familiar economic one (a phenomenon that Wallerstein terms
geoculture; Wallerstein 1991). But such expansive gestures have typically been anathema
to literary studies. As John Guillory explains, when literary studies first coalesced into a distinct
discipline in the 1890s, it defined its field of interest as whatever in language was resistant to
scientific rationality [and which therefore signifies] a resistance to science itself, to modern
civilization (356). This split between literature (viewed as a refusal of modernity) and the social
sciences (viewed as a descriptive account of modernitys rules and structures) has persisted
throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, featuring prominently in modernisms romantic
critiques of mass industrialism, in C. P. Snows famed analysis of the post-World War II two
cultures divide, in the radical social movements of the 1960s, and in modern literary studies.
Literary criticism has therefore always been more disposed toward reading cultural productions
as anti-systemic gestures. We are often more interested in how literature exceeds dominant
social and political codes than in how it conforms to them, whether we understand this
difference as cultural specificity or as anti-capitalist resistance. It seems, then, that geocultural
analysis remains trapped between two incompatible registers: too subjective for the social
sciences, its totalizing ambitions likewise rest uneasily with a literary studies committed to
individual acts of culture and distance from larger political systems.
This essay is the first of a two-part series that examines how the tension between cultural
analysis and systemic structures plays out in recent work on literary world-systems. While both
essays discuss how this scholarship intersects with the recent global turn in literary studies, they
focus more directly on how world-systems theorys model of global space has reshaped the way
we practice literary history. In this first essay, my primary concern is with how Marxism
mediated literary studies first encounters with world-systems theory, and with how this convergence between Marxism and world-systems theory has inf luenced the way that scholars talk
about global literary history. This pairing of Marxism and world-systems theory is consistent
with a long tradition of humanistic engagement with social scientific theory, for which Marxism
has often provided an initial entry-point into discussions within economics, history, and sociology (albeit an entry-point permeated by Continental and poststructural philosophy). It is therefore unsurprising that world-systems theory, a methodology that itself developed out of debates
within Marxist social and economic theory, would find a natural fit within Marxist literary
scholarship. But world-systems theorys radically revisionist model of global space has done
more than simply broaden scholarly investigations to a more global frame: it has also revised
many of the methodological assumptions through which its practitioners conduct literary
history. In order to show how world-systems theory has inf luenced these methodologies, I trace
its initial emergence out of discussions within the field of radical history before proceeding to
examine how these discussions are then taken up in postcolonialism, Marxist literary theory,
and modernist studies. As I show, this dialogue between literary studies and world-systems theory
continues to be one of the central venues through which literary studies have been able to think
through its disciplines relationship with the social sciences and, in particular, to quantitative
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social sciences like economic history, radical geography, and economic sociology.1 Directing our
attention to world-systems theorys reception among Marxist literary critics may therefore give us
an insight into how our discipline has internalized certain aspects of social scientific thought.
World-Systems Theorys Radical Economics
World-systems theory is usually identified with the towering figure of Immanuel Wallerstein
and his monumental four-volume study, The Modern World-System. But while Wallerstein has
done more than perhaps any scholar to popularize and disseminate this methodology, the field
in fact grew out of a number of intersecting currents in academic scholarship, including
Marxist economics, dependista theory, and Annales historiography. What held these otherwise
disparate fields together was a common interest in African, Asian, and Latin American decolonization and, more particularly, in the limitations political independence seemed to hold
for facilitating economic development. These limitations first started to become visible in
the early 1960s, when African nationalists such as Frantz Fanon and Kwame Nkrumah
diagnosed a continued neocolonial control of African countries economies by European
and American businesses. Fanon and Nkrumah differed somewhat in their analyses of neocolonialism Fanon saw the subordination to European capital as a by-product of a stunted
national consciousness, one that had molded national elites into bourgeois cadres more loyal
to international capitalism than an independent national culture, while for the more populist
Nkrumah, the roots of neocolonialism resided directly in the multinational corporations that
still operated on African soil but both acknowledged that political liberation needed to be
supplemented by a parallel economic revolution (Fanon 1963; Nkrumah 1965). This was the
same conclusion arrived at by dependista theorists from Latin America, who in the late
1960s formulated a sustained critique of modernization and its capacity for economic growth.
According to Frank (1969), Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1964), and Theotonio dos Santos
(1970), among others, the impoverishment of Latin American countries that had been
nominally independent for far longer than their African and Asian counterparts indicated that
the sources of inequality had to be sought, not in a universal national trajectory from feudalism
to capitalism (as capitalist and Marxist critics alike tended to believe), but in the regions continued subordination to European capital. The dependistas thus devoted their time and energy
to showing how Latin Americas underdeveloped economies were connected to their role
as exporters of cheap natural resources to Europe and the United States, as well as to advocating for the development of local industries that could replace foreign imports with domestic
products (a process known as import substitution).2
World-systems theory shares the dependistas sense that inequality is produced relationally, in
the gap between metropole and periphery, but it also adds a methodological principle for the
study of such trade networks: that such inequalities can only be seen if one treats the capitalist
world economy as a single unit of analysis, one with its own unique structure and history.
Wallerstein first introduces this conceptual unit in volume one of The Modern World-System,
in which he characterizes the global capitalist economy as
a world system, not because it encompasses the whole world, but because it is larger than any
juridically-dened political unit. And it is a world-economy because the basic linkage between the parts
of the system is economic. (Wallerstein 1974, 15)

By making this leap from nation-state to global economy, Wallersteins work signals two
important breaks in the study of capitalism. First, Wallerstein argues that capitalism is not
extensive with a particular division of labor or mode of production say, free wage labor
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and for-profit agricultural and/or industrial production but is instead rooted in trade f lows
across classes, regions, and nations. According to this model, so-called peripheral nations
supply core ones with cheap goods that can be resold at vastly inf lated profits, while core
regions simultaneously monopolize control over higher-priced luxuries and services. And
since this surplus capital emerges from the different prices commodities command when they
cross from one zone to another, solutions to postcolonial nations economic woes cannot be
found in either a stagist notion of nation development or through nationalist projects to
end dependency on foreign capital, goods, or markets. The actual commodities being used
to garner profits and the means through which they are produced are almost, in a sense,
arbitrary. They are mere epiphenomena that conceal the ways in which the global
economys structure i.e., trade networks really produces value. To fix economic
disparity, then, one would have to overhaul the entire global economic system. Anything less
would only force capitalist enterprise to take a new shape, as it has already done numerous
times (e.g., in the shift from 18th-century mercantilism to 19th-century laissez-faire policies,
or in the more recent shift from Keynesian welfare capitalism to a globalized
service economy).
Second, Wallerstein understands the world economy to be fundamentally cyclical in nature.
Borrowing from Fernand Braudel and fellow Annales school historians, he begins from the
premise that there are a plurality of social times, including eternal social laws, the time of
day-to-day events (lhistoire vnementielle), and the often-overlooked longue dure, a period of
extended duration that is nevertheless transitory in nature (Wallerstein 1998, 83). Of these three
time scales, it is the longue dure that governs structures like the world economy, which demonstrate a certain consistency over time despite not being historical universals (82). However,
the problem, as Wallerstein sees it, is that social scientific scholarship has found it difficult to
conceptualize the longue dures middle ground (84). Without being able to able to detect
trends and changes in transitory structures, we are prevented from making theoretical statements
about how systems like the economy work across time which, of course, is one of the central
goals of world-systems theory. Wallerstein thus tasks historians and sociologists with investigating so-called long wave or Kondratieff cycles: 50-to-60-year price cycles of growth and
stagnation that recur with regularity (Wallerstein 1984). These long wave cycles, Wallerstein
insists, are both the mechanism that represents the life of an historical system [like the world
economy] and one through which such a system operates (Wallerstein 1984, 209). That is,
long wave cycles are both a conceptual tool that scholars can use to examine the world-systems
transitory-yet-durable structures and a certain type of temporality through which the worldsystem itself lives and grows. This makes the long wave cycle an ideal instrument for scholars
who, like Wallerstein, hope to achieve a greater theoretical understanding of what a capitalist
system is in its innermost essence.
Subsequent work in the field has been largely shaped by discussions of these long wave cycles,
including debates over such important conceptual issues as how economic cycles affect the
emergence of specific modes of production and what their precise relation to capitalism is.
Today, the critical consensus is that long wave cycles result from intrinsic contradictions
between rising costs of production and the uneven distribution of economic profits across classes
and geographic regions: as soon as wealth becomes too polarized to meet businesses demands,
the world economy undergoes a systemic shift that relocates economic production within new
industries, geographies, and populations of laborers (Wallerstein 1984, 568; Shapiro 2008, 34;
Harvey 2006). But there is still considerable controversy over whether these long wave cycles
are inherently capitalist or in fact predate capitalism and, if they are older than capitalism,
whether we should replace them with a more appropriate unit of analysis (Frank 1998, 1-51;
Arrighi 6-9).
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From Postcolonialism to Hegel: Marxist Interpretations of the World-System

Somewhat surprisingly, given the prominent place world-systems theory has enjoyed in leftist
academic criticism, literary studies has been rather slow to engage with the approachs
methodology and central claims. Much of this delay has likely been a side effect of postcolonial
criticism, which during the 1980s and 1990s maintained a near-monopoly over the interpretation
of non-Western texts. After all, it has become something of a critical truism that postcolonial
studies developed through a poststucturalist blend of deconstruction and discourse analysis,
from whose perspective materialist analyses of economic life appear as, at best, crude and
reductionist and, at worst, as complicit with the master narratives of modernity against
which postcolonial criticism sets itself.3 At times, this anti-materialist stance was quite explicit:
in his famed study The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha took direct aim at Marxist social
scientists, claiming that
the postcolonial project seeks to explore those social pathologies loss of meaning, conditions of
anomie that no longer simply cluster around class antagonism, [but] break into widely scattered
historical contingencies The postcolonial perspective departs from the traditions of the sociology
of underdevelopment or dependency theory The postcolonial perspective resists the attempt at
holistic forms of social explanation. (171, 173; quoted in Lazarus 2011, 1112)

More often, though, the contradiction between materialism and postcolonial studies has been
implicit, a matter of disciplinary convention rather than outright hostility. Janet Wolff succinctly
describes this impasse when she observes that the discourse of those working in cultural
theory is of such a radically different order from sociologists that they have no way of
transforming this particular debate (163). Just think, for example, of the vast distance separating
such terms as identity, hegemony, and desire from sociological ones like structural
characteristic, voluntarism, and center and periphery. All of these terms grapple with
how to assess structural inequality and its relationship to lived realities, but they do so through
radically different languages. It is unclear how exactly hegemony would map onto a
centerperiphery divide, nor is it obvious how subjective identifications and desires lead to
voluntaristic (or non-voluntaristic) actions. Both disciplines clearly agree on the need for radical
politics in the academy, but this has not made it any easier to translate their mutual commitment
into a single methodological language.
As the 1980s and 1990s wore on, two critical programs tried to overcome this disciplinary impasse. One response emerged out of a collision between the Subaltern Studies group and Indian
Marxism and consisted of a Gramscian critique of so-called First World and postcolonial
intellectuals. The works that made up this response, among which we might count such diverse
voices as Gayatri Spivak, Aijaz Ahmad, and Arif Dirlik, argued that capitalisms international
division of labor created different social, cultural, and epistemological realities for different classes of people including intellectuals. The second response, associated most commonly with
Fredric Jamesons work on Third World literature and imperialism, was much more deeply
rooted in Frankfurt School critical theory and a specifically Continental mode of Marxism. This
line of scholarship directed its attention less at issues of hegemony and cultural heterogeneity
than on how such differences were created and synthesized within a singular world-system.
The disparate intellectual commitments unpinning each of these programs led to visions of
the world-system that were often at odds with one another, but it should not be overlooked that
both Gramscian and Jamesonian Marxism shared a belief in a granulated, uneven world-system.
At a time when much Marxist and post-Marxist thinking was moving in the opposite direction
by stressing the homogenizing nature of globalization a trend that would culminate in Michael
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Hardt and Antonio Negris popular sensation Empire these two critical traditions continued to
see the world as an uneven network of trade, production, and capital.
The Gramscian-Subalternist response to world-systems theory was in many ways the more
contentious of the two. Despite the fact that the Subaltern Studies project grew out of history
and anthropology, which might lead one to expect a more materialist, less poststructuralist
account of world space than literary postcolonialism, it borrowed quite prodigally from both
literary theory and poststructuralism. As Vivek Chibber notes in his blistering account of the
groups politics, the Subalternists embraced the poststructuralist critique of Enlightenment
universalism and grand narratives as a tool for the reimagining of colonial historiography. The
central Subalternist theorists Spivak, Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Partha
Chatterjee insisted that colonial modernity was fundamentally and irreconcilably Other
to Western modernity, and that Marxist sociologys secularist analyses of labor, trade, and
markets could not adequately explain either peasant struggles in India or the religious language
in and through which such struggles were framed. In doing so, the Subalternists contested the
central platform of world-systems theory: the notion that global capitalism is a single totalizing
structure that must be studied as an entire system. Such distinctions between Western and
colonial modernity, as Chibber elaborates, effectively evacuate capitalism from the colonial
world, as they fail to see how capitalism systematically generates heterogeneity, differences that
are subject to the same basic forces and are therefore part of the same basic history (24, 285, 291).
What Chibber and world-systems theory would see as constitutive differences within a system
are instead coded as epistemological and ontological divides between different types of
systems: the bourgeois markets of Western Europe, and a colonial state home to
non-Western forms of power and political organization. There are clearly interactions between
these two systems, but their differing logics, according to the Subalternists, prevents any holist
statements from being made about European and colonial economies together.4
Because of the way the Subalternists contrasted Western and colonial modernity, their theories ultimately proved more effective in locating intellectual production within the worldsystem than in historicizing particular literary cultures. The best example of this can be found
in Spivaks well-known essay Can the Subaltern Speak?, which draws a clear line between
what can (and should) be said by metropolitan intellectuals and what cannot be articulated by
colonial voices. More so than many of her fellow Subalternists, whose debts to Western and
Indian Marxist traditions were strong yet fraught,5 Spivak has always insisted that her thinking
is simultaneously deconstructivist feminist Marxist, and this Marxism comes to the fore when
her essay connects representation and the ability to speak to the international division of labor
(Spivak 1990, 133; Spivak 1988,69). When Spivak criticizes Western intellectuals such as
Foucault and Deleuze for speaking in the name of a group not their own, the (largely
non-Western) working class, her assessment hinges upon the place of the intellectual in the
world-system. The problem with Foucault and Deleuzes championing of the working class,
in Spivaks eyes, is that they characterize the role of the intellectual as transparent, when in
fact their belief in the representability of other social groups stems from their own experience
of First World socialized capital, where working-class industrial regimentation went
hand-in-hand with political mobilization (70, 78). In the so-called Third World, in contrast,
the absence of a consumerist culture that would bind workers, production, and consumption
more closely together places workers and governments outside of the circuits of coercion and
accountability that make political representation possible (83). This formulation makes it almost
impossible to historicize subaltern literary productions in the larger world-system within
this framework, a truly subaltern literature could only consist of pure aphasia, the inability
to speak or be spoken for but it does give us a concrete sense of how and why metropolitan
intellectuals seek to speak for the Other. As Spivak explains, an alliance politics with the
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working class, the Third World, or non-Western women holds such a strong appeal to
intellectuals in large part because it offers a means for consolidating their own power (84).
Struggling against a unified oppression lends credence to intellectuals own hegemonic claims
to authority, knowledge, and ethical action to an extent that would not be feasible if
intellectuals only spoke for their own specialized class faction. Intellectuals are thus caught in
a troubling double-bind: their very resistance against a particular type of bourgeois hegemony
often left suitably vague, so as to leave room for alliances with other social groups can itself
be seen as an imperializing gesture that takes advantage of the asymmetrical power relations
between First World intellectuals and Third World workers.
If intellectuals occupy a particular class position within the world-systems international
division of labor, this is equally true of those scholars who first pioneered postcolonial theory
itself. Later critics, working in a much more explicitly Marxist vein than the Subalternists,
observed that postcolonial theorists were almost exclusively immigrant intellectuals who had
traveled from non-Western countries to the Anglo-American academy. The exact details on
how this collective migration was alleged to have inf luenced postcolonial theory could vary
from critic to critic, but most agreed that the fields investment in discourse analysis obscured
the class interests motivating the consolidation of postcolonial theory within the university.
For example, the Marxist writer Aijaz Ahmad sees postcolonial and Third World literature
as terms that conf late non-Western literatures with immigrant literatures in metropolitan
countries. The efficacy of these terms, according to Ahmad, is that they enable immigrant
intellectuals to declare a continued connection between their current economic position and
that of their countries of origin, a procedure which both grants them a specialized authority over
non-Western works and reinforces a transcontinental class alliance between newly
metropolitan intellectuals and the bourgeois intelligentsia inside non-Western countries (76).
(We might add that the peculiarly transnational form of Indian citizenship, which endows
non-resident status to Indian nationals living abroad, proved an especially fertile ground for
such a transnational class alliance and may explain why Indian writings played such a central role
in the emergence of postcolonial theory.) Arif Dirliks examinations of postcolonial theory reach
much the same conclusion, as Dirlik finds the rise of postcolonial theory to ref lect Third World
intellectuals newfound power in First World academe (62). The point that Dirlik, Ahmad,
and other Marxist scholars urge us to keep in mind is that postcolonialism is not a dehistoricizable
methodology but is instead a product of concrete shifts within the global economy: new
trends in creative and academic labor, new developments in nation-states immigration and
labor policies, and a felt need to internationalize academic institutions to suit the
requirements of transnational corporations (Dirlik 75).6
In contrast to the Gramscian-Subalternist approach to the world-system, the work of such
Marxist critics as Fredric Jameson, Neil Lazarus, and Nicholas Brown attempts to map literature
onto the geography of a capitalist world-system under the aegis of what we might call a leftist
Hegelianism. These writers took their inspiration from Fanons dialectical reading of the
colonial encounter in Wretched of the Earth and Black Skins, White Masks, where Fanon theorizes
that capitalism in its imperial guise operates through the construction of opposing ontological
categories: white/black, human/subhuman, and civilization/barbarity. For Jameson and his
fellow Marxist critics, Fanons insight can be extended to global capitalism as a whole, which
should be understood, they argue, as a totality in the Hegelian sense: that is, as a single field
bound together through the dialectical play of constitutive opposites. If trade networks created
and maintained structural inequalities between core and peripheral nations, as worldsystems theory proposed, Marxists suggested that these networks did so by fashioning core
and periphery into mirror images of one another. As such, it is not merely different types of
commodities and modes of production that transform when one moves from First to Third
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World, but the very epistemological and ontological coordinates of culture, society, and the
economy. And in the time-honored Hegelian tradition of reading difference as dialectical
struggle, Jamesonian Marxism organized core and peripheral cultures into inverse pairs that fit
together like a jigsaw puzzle: First-World individualism/Third-World collectivism, First-World
industry/Third-World manual labor, First-World psychopathology/Third-World anthropology, First-World modernism/Third-World national allegory.
In Modernism and Imperialism and Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational
Capitalism, for example, Jameson juxtaposes modernisms psychologizing stylistics with
Third-World literatures collectivist epistemologies. On the one hand, European modernists
such as E. M. Forster (Howards End), Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness), and Virginia Woolf
(To the Lighthouse) face the insurmountable challenge of representing an
economic system [part of which] is now located elsewhere, beyond the metropolis, outside of the
daily life and existential experience of the home country, in colonies over the water whose own life
experience and life world remains unknown and unimaginable for the subjects of imperial power
( Jameson 2007, 157).

As a result, modernist authors substitute a formalist style that attempts to recreate the
ungraspable totality of the early 20th century world-system within the modernist artwork
itself. This will-to-style accounts for the recurrent images of closure we find throughout
modernist literature: the Great North Road in Howards End (which stretches
toward infinity) or Marlows multi-colored map in Heart of Darkness, both of which strain
to represent the capitalist world-system through allegorical symbols (Forster 280; Conrad 7).
In other words, the very stylistic innovations we associate with modernism interiority,
epistemological skepticism, the search for a total artwork stem, at least in part, from
the international division of labor. It is precisely because modernists cannot comprehend their
economic world that they direct their efforts inward, toward their own consciousness and the
novels formal properties.
On the other hand, Third-World literature, as Jameson sees it, demonstrates the absence
of such psychologizing imperatives and a greater awareness of real material conditions.
Because the radical split between private consciousness and the public world of classes
is understood to be a symptom of capitalist culture, Third-World Literature folds the story
of the private individual destiny (a formal characteristic Jameson presumes to be endemic to
the European novel) within an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world
culture and society ( Jameson 1986, 69). Like the Hegelian slave, whose labor for his master
enables him to achieve some true materialistic consciousness of his situation, the ThirdWorld novel reveals the material circumstances underlying its heros journey (85). Its lack
of formalist innovation, the hallmark of the modernist novel, should therefore not be seen
as a deficiency, but rather as an index of the closer connection between Third-World
culture and capitalist History itself. In a sense, Jameson inverts the values we often associate with
literature: modernist formalism is hollow and pathological, while Third-World realism traces
the f lows of capital, labor, and goods that remain mystified in the modernist novel.
Jamesons Hegelian approach to the world-system dominated Marxist literary theory through
much of the 1990s and 2000s, but many adherents were careful to qualify his more sweeping
generalizations. Jamesons use of the term Third World proved a particularly thorny issue:
soon after Jamesons Third-World essay was published, Aijaz Ahmad attacked the piece for
collapsing all non-Western literature into a single blanket category (967).7 For Nicholas
Brown in particular, Ahmads critique proved valuable to the extent that it revealed Jamesons
conf lation of the subsumption of older economic forms under Capital with the problems of
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the peripheral national economy (8). In other words, the very Hegelian imaginary that had
prompted Jameson to divide First- and Third-World into a series of antithetical categories was
seen by Brown as confusing the First-/Third-World dichotomy with capitalist modernization
itself. The problem with such a view was that it separated the Third World off into a romantic
anti-capitalist preserve without realizing that Third-World nationalism was itself a product of
capitalist modernity. Far from being inherently European, several of the phenomena that
Jameson excludes from Third-World cultures individualism, private ownership, psychological
alienation might be more properly said to follow from the nation-state form. For this reason,
critics such as Brown and Neil Lazarus jettison the Hegelian dialectic between First- and
Third-World and reposition it along an external axis. In Browns Utopian Generations, the dialectic
is displaced onto History itself: both modernist and African literatures are said to be attempts to
capture a sublime capitalist history that fundamentally resists representation. Lazaruss Nationalism
and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World uses the term modernity in a similar fashion, though
for him the issue at hand is not so much the differing formal practices of modernist and
postcolonial literatures as the coeval modernity of West and non-West (24). Any ontological
distinction between these two literatures fails, in Lazaruss eyes, to see how capitalism emerged
as a global system, thus making postcolonial culture every bit as modern as European culture
(1667).
What is striking about this Marxist paradigm is the extent to which its impact has been felt
more emphatically in modernist studies than in postcolonial studies.8 Particularly in the late
1990s and 2000s, with the advent of a historicist-oriented New Modernist Studies (Mao
and Walkowitz), reading modernist formalism as the aesthetic of imperialism bore powerful
yields. We can divide these critical responses into three general trends. The first, which has been
most directly associated with Jed Estys work on national culture, has sought to distinguish a
late modernist approach to Englishness from its high modernist predecessor (Esty 2).
Where high modernism had been unable to conceptualize the cosmopolitan reach of empire
(except via a subjectivist formalism), late modernism, according to these critics, reimagined
England as an insular culture isolated from imperial entanglements. The exact form this
Englishness took often varied from writer to writer, but it remained a common frame of
reference for a wide range of literary projects, including E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, and
T. S. Eliots populist pageant plays (Esty 54107), George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, and the
Angry Young Mens efforts to redefine the class system as a peculiarly English phenomenon
(Kalliney), and the rise of English Cultural Studies (Esty 18298).
Second, many scholars have found in Jamesons writings a way to explain Irelands great
f lowering of modernist writers. Focusing on Irelands uneven colonial economy, which
was rent between a highly modernized agrarian economy and underdeveloped urban spaces,
these critics suggest that Irelands disproportionately agrarian middle class nurtured modernist
experimentalism (Eagleton 273319). Depending on the critic, agrarian capitalism either
prematurely destroyed the ancien rgime and any limitations it might have imposed on modernist
culture, thus enabling a literary intelligentsia to speedily develop without any material
connections to the broader Irish public (Cleary 86-94); or, agrarian capitalism prejudiced Irish
writers against modern industrial capitalism, resulting in a conservative attempt to anesthetize
Irish culture from modernity through modernist solipsism (Eagleton 273319).
Finally, recent efforts to globalize modernism have turned to Jamesons work in the hopes
of finding a way to broaden modernism beyond its traditional Euro-American boundaries. This
impulse can best be seen in The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, which adopts a largely
Jamesonian definition of what it means to globalize modernism.9 If modernist form results
from certain economic structures, as Jameson argues, then it stands to reason that similar socioeconomic dispensations can also produce modernist literature in such spatially and temporally
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600 The Literary History of World-Systems

distant locales as interwar Italy and Russia (Ram), post-WWII Nigeria (Lazarus; Lincoln), and
1950s South Africa (Morris).
If this is true, then Jamesonian Marxism may provide us with a solution to one of modernisms most vexing questions is modernism a period, or is it a style? (Williams) by asking us
to rethink style as a structural effect of the world-system. There remains much work to be done
in terms of defining the ontological and epistemological coordinates governing the interactions
between economic structure and style, but what this theoretical framework does manage to do is
to provide scholars with a vibrant area for future research. We still, for one, need to develop a
better understanding of what structures are in their innermost essence. What does it mean to
say that a structure can repeat across different times and places? How can we create a geography
of such structures, one which not only identifies their existence but which also explains the
rationale for their rise, fall, and reemergence? And how can we trace the dialectical relationship
between structure and style in such a way that we do justice not only to the world-systems
effects on literature but also to literatures role in the formation and consolidation of economic
structures themselves? These are some of the questions that promise to make world-systems
theory a site of continuing interest to literary critics for years to come.

Short Biography
Matthew Eatough is Assistant Professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY, where he teaches
postcolonial and modernist literature. He is the assistant editor of the Oxford Handbook of Global
Modernisms (Oxford, 2012) and the founding editor of Crossing Borders: Studies in Global Literature
and Culture, a book series from Peter Lang. His essays have appeared in such journals as Modern
Language Quarterly, Modern Fiction Studies, Literature and Medicine, Safundi, and Twentieth-Century
Literature. He is currently working on two book projects: Long Waves of Modernity: Global History, the World-System, and the Making of the Anglophone Novel, 18802010, and Open for Business:
A Literary History of the Corporation in Africa, 19452015.
Notes
* Correspondence: English Department, Baruch College, CUNY, One Bernard Baruch Way, Box B7/240, New York,
NY 10010, United States. Email: Matthew.Eatough@baruch.cuny.edu

1
For global approaches to economic history, see Belich; Cain and Hopkins; Darwin; ORourke and Williamson. For radical
geography, see Harvey; Smith; Tanoukhi. For economic sociology, see Arrighi.
2
Though largely concerned with Latin America, dependency theory has also been applied to Africa in Walter Rodneys
classic How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.
3
For a detailed summary of postcolonial studies fraught relationship with Marxism, see Bartolovitch and Lazarus 117.
4
We can see a lingering remnant of this skepticism toward world-systems theorys will-to-systematicity in Dipesh
Chakrabarys recent work on climate change. Chakrabartys primary intervention in this eld has been to insist that the
narrative of capitalism is an insufcient framework for interrogating the history of climate change and its
consequences (217). In his eyes, the environment rightly occupies the global position that capitalist theories of
globalization from Braudel to Wallerstein to Arrighi have claimed for the world-system, and it is the reality of global
warming that shows the limits to capitals allegedly global reach, both in terms of spatial and temporal extent and in
terms of explanatory power.
Spivaks recent defense of planetarity performs a similar manoeuver when she argues that the planetary is independent
of, and absolutely other to, the global system of capitalism (Spivak 2005, 97). Furthermore, to the extent that Spivaks
planetary sphere is rooted in language and translation rather than the environment and climate change, it restages the
long-standing opposition between culture and social system with which I began this essay.

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601

The Subalternists analyses of colonial modernity relied heavily on Gramscian ideas of dominance and hegemony, but
these ideas were usually used to talk about how and why dominance and hegemony operated differently in the colonies
than in the Western world.
6
Spivak, for her part, has embraced this critique of postcolonial theory and has warned her readers about theories, however
subtly argued, that support that idea that upward class mobilitymimicry and masqueradeis unmediated resistance
(Spivak 1999, xii). Her work repeatedly cautions that academics must be wary of over-privileging the narrative of the
upwardly mobile Eurocentric economic migrant over and above other, less visible subject positions (Spivak 1999, 69).
7
For a full summary of the debate occasioned by Ahmads piece, see Lazarus 2011, 93102.
8
Though it is important to note that other disciplines were also in the process of connecting modernity with capitalist
development, albeit via very different intellectual paths. Anthropology, for example, began to examine how certain
cultures beliefs about modernity were closed tied to the lure of capitalist development. See in particular James
Fergusons Expectations of Modernity and Global Shadows.
9
For detailed discussions of Jamesons role in The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, see Mark Wollaegers introduction
to the collection, as well as the Literature Compass forum devoted to the collection (Literature Compass 9.9)

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