78. Liliana Weinberg irquez, Gabriel, “La soledad de América Latina” (1982) in Dit e la novela latinoamericana. Garcia Marquez/Vargas Llosa. Lima: Editorial Peed Andino, 1988, Gonzalez Echevarria, Roberto. The Voice of the Masters: Writing and Authority in rdern Latin American Literature. Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1985. Print Irwin, Robert McKee y Ménica Szurmuk coords. Diccionario de estudios culturales latinoamericanos. México: Ludmer, Josefina. “Literan 7 Aug, 2014. Mariétegui, José Carlos. Temas de Nuestra América, Lima: Amau tas 17 (2007): pag. Web, 1928. Prine. na.” Tempo modernidad incompleta a la modernidad- jedad 166 (2000): 44~61. Print smundo: Nuevos referentes para la co rmacién y causas del Buenos Aires: CEDAL, 1972. Pr 5 On World Literary Reading Literature, the Market, and the Antinomies of Mobility Pieter Vermeulen 1. WORLD LITERATURE AND THE POLITICS OF READING We all know whar’s wrong with world literature—and if we don't, we can count on Tim Parks ly remind us. As “we are movi ” Parks notes in one of his typical missives, writers increasingly surrender the “subtle nuances of [their] own language and literary culture” in order to “remove obstacles to international com- prehension.” Vernacular particularity has become so much “culture-specific chu t needs to be cleaned away and replaced by a sanitized selection of “highly visible tropes immediately recognizable as native” and b ig of a poll author among those ‘working for world peace™ (Parks n.p. his crit the authors producing contemporary world literature, his al impotence also echoes in ough anthologies, translations, editions, ai world literature. The institutions of worl rature, on such critical accounts, operate to promote a fiction of frictionless iterary circulation that obscures the inequalities marking the literary worl let alone the non-literary world; they cater, so this refrain goes, to privilege consumers’ demands for easily digestible cultural differences and vat ences that world fail to disturb its audiences—more damning! ly calibrated mi he exotic and the familiar is assumed to keep them hooked; nor is ‘m that world literature is entirely compatible with the material ies forged and perpetuated by the market—worse, by promoting rary culture as an imaginary dispenser of equal of world literature is rooted in its pro- nnless transport, a seemingly more appropriate in those elements that stubbornly resist transpo Apter's widely noted Against World Literat vestment is coded as a politics of untranslatabi ‘The Un for Apter, is that which resists comprehen- is “that x-factor that disqualifies presumptive80. Pieter Vermeulen \e spanner thrown in the interlocking machines |. For Aptcr, this spanner is thrown not by world erature, which a new comparative fi pacauee Teeaoare ve i avoid reproducing neo-imperial ‘over Untranslatables as so many subsumption under « ‘One weak point of Apter’s case for a new compara we Untranslatable is that it may underestimate the mas tundervalues the power of contemporary capital to convert singularities into ‘marketable differences, and to design niche markers for experiences that may pecific in ways that raphies” (42) and that watches, herself promotes—on d in effect boils down to heeding the Untranslatable, ing at the challenges and obstructions of linguistic is volume, such a pos : obliterates the very real inequalities Id—whether we design that field in the super- unt of [Apter and others), or according to the more halting rhythms of nontranslation, For Brouillette, a turf war bet iodological debate that, by misrecognizing its outcomes as political internal to that constituted industry and will be stripped of idiosyncrasy and dulled by accommodation” (Walkowitz 172) directly feeds into the conviction that obstructing circu- lation somehow becomes a laudable oppositional practice for writers ot professional readers. In effect, this is a discursive feedback loop that leaves the material constitution of the literary field entirely untouched ce that does not mis- let's own sociological approach to literature offers one answer: ly brackets che temptation of close On World Literary Reading 81 has developed a fine-grained ‘writing is inscribed in the market and its inst at hand. In this essay, by borrowing a more encompassing understanding of th ns between world literature and the market in order to address the via- ‘of a project that Rebecca Walkowitz has called “close reading in an age ies of reading how literary ly overlapping) horizons of world literature and inflect, distort, and refract the socioeconomic forces that ofthe ways contemporary the market media afflict them. One writing engages the demands of the ature. As Pheng Cheah has recently literary discourses tend ro conflate “the world with market sxtensiveness”—a tendency that reduces literature to “an epiphenomenon of a macerial base” (“World against Globe” 317, 311). This reduction misrecognizes “world literature as an active power of wor that does not simply coincide with the reality made by capitalist glo but instead insists on its abiding difference from it (303 As | argue in the next section and demonstrate in the rest of the essay through a reading of one novel, the demands of the markets and the aspira tions of work indeed, I situate literary work: worldliness theie worldly aspirations and their undeniable supersaturation by market demands. The mode of world literary reading that I propose reads for that gap. The no ss, Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beauti- ful Things That Heaven Bears (2007), lends itself very well to such a reading: not only does its account of the lives of Ethiopian immigrants in the United ‘States—written, moreover, by an Ethiopi the realities of globalization; its protagonist promises of economic success and the realities of their ambitio worldly realization, Still, I argue that the novel’s engagement nomic forces is not only situated on a thematic level, but lations of affect and potent my mode of world literary reading workable for a much broader range of contemporary fictions. This approach is decidedly less sociologi itintervenes in the meth- odological debates that Apter also part ultimately understands the relation berween the market and literary singularity very differently—a differ- s will become clear, also leads me to moderate the often somewhat | claims of work lization82. Pieter Vermeulen intensified sinc ‘This “intensification”—a technical described as a process of reciprocal saturation: not only have fof the market infiltrated all but the most marginal restricted cultural fields, but also the contemporary market itself, Nealon writes, is “cultural to the Indeed, long before the economy morphed into the manipu- trafficking in information, the embrace of undecid- -ments already populated promise of resistance t0 tra its thorough envelopment in market processes—processes that would be properly unthinkable wit ion of the literary. Due to its relentless imbrication with market forces, literature, Nealon writes, can no longer bbe valorized as “the subordinated, supposedly subversive term in any opposition” (152)—as both terms of any opposition are now equivalent positions on a field of exchange. Literature, that is, can no longer be promoted as a “mode of inexorable slownes and this means autonomy ‘And what goes for uselessness ‘With no Untranslatable to be invested with political power because ary studies in the age of market saturation need to find ways to describe literature’s engagement with—rather than celebrate its illusory disengagement from—the market. They need to be attuned ro the affective and vital dimensions along which literature has always operated, ‘and which the market has increasingly begun to colonize in its compulsive literature has always aimed to manipulate readers affects, ig, affect flows, and this in terms of potentiality also alters contemporary literature’s affective potency” —its ambition to “exrend the range of a person's cap. for thinking and feeling” beyond the scenarios ratified by market ideologies (Houen 11-12). The reciprocal saturation of literature and the market means 1at literature is thoroughly permeated by socioeconomic forces; yet because he management of affect and potentiality—are also the market through cerature in an age of described as a position of singularity through satura On World Literary Reading 83 So what does all of this have to do with world Ii ee ree ture? How, that is, ‘cen the world and the globe, or This distinction has 1¢ Nancy (in his The mn) and Jacques Derrida (in Rogues ies of Nancy's and Derrida’s thinking do not concern me here, it is remarkable that they both posi sation ox “world-forming” (the term adopted by Nancy’ mode of meaning-making that is irreducible to the rea ‘accessible and transparent for and Pettigrew 1) and offers no van- In a comparable way, Derrida emphasizes the aspiratio > ‘emphasizes the aspirational qualities inherent in the term mondialisation—its functioning as a normative claim to com- munity and as a (Kantian) regulative Idea rather than a descriptive teem (Rogues 85; se Lil itis, for berter or worse inl be reduced to the forces of global capitalism. Interestingly, both Nancy and Derrida cast the difference between mondi- alisation and globalization in tetms of (un)translatability: Nancy notes that ‘mondialisation preserves something untranslatable, while globalization has already translated everything in a global idiom” (28; for Derrida, see * Does it Mean” 118 an s of these forces. engagement ‘commitment to an irreducible reality—a site where complicity and imbrication ‘enable eather than cancel such commitment. Aamir Mufti has influential shown that hee agent of global dispersed bodies of is literature” (488) this genealogy does not cancel the potent ived forms, which for Mufti take the shape close reading, language and text at various levels of social rea84° Pieter Vermeulen ly commitment through comy intic structure accurately captut ature is often seen as a “pater centric” label (Cheah, “What is a World?” 31 and disingenuously “disconnects literature from its own (Helgesson 485 notion of world is ly ) world literature scholarship—it persists as something less determinate: it delivers “world as an ongoing, dynamic process of becoming, something continually made and remade” (Cheah, “What is a World?” 30-31)—as a placeholder for the aspiration to construct meaning and difference in excess the forces of the market that yet saturate joted before that the quately describes th is the work of reading for that dimension. If world literature is, as David Damrosch has famously noted, first of al “a mode of reading” (86), then I suggest that a reading that traces sature by the dictates of the market in order to discover their mini- mal difference from these dictates can be called world literary reading—a the reduction of literature to a of socioeconomic forces before. AAs Pheng Cheah has noted, “[ilf we collapse the world into a geographical iterature autonomy by reducing it to a superstructure of an economic base” (“What is a World?” 30). In a recent assessment of the productive tensions between world literature and postcolonial studies, Stefan Helgesson echoes this idea when he notes that world literature’s focus ‘on global circulation reminds postcol be understood exclusively in terms of also as a world of forces, and recognizes t the persistence of co fosters an understanding th. cannot be seen either asa purely autonomous realm or as a mere the colonial drama between dominant and dominated—it is instead a more id phenomenon, evolving as it circulates” (496). For Cheah, this mode of reading delivers a recognition of literature as “a fundamental force in the igoing cartography and creation of the world” (“What is a World?” 31). literary perspective, for Helgesson, makes “the full range of th le, from local generic conventions and the singular encounter On World Literary Reading 85 the way to the global flows of genres, books and translations across dozens of languages” (489). Different world ferary approaches access this broad range in different ways: Helgesson himself privileges translation as an angle from which to enter this spectrum, just as Brouillette, as we saw, favours literary sociology; my approach, in contrast, aims to condense this spectrum into a site of overdetermi thar world literary reading can access through a close engagement with texts’ treatment of affect and potentiality, as these are two of the crucial es that suture it to the market. the rest of this essay, novel in order to contemporary American migrant y of world literary reading. I trace the imbrication of Dinaw Mengestu's The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears with the powers that (almost) saturate contemporary migrant lives, the minimal rift between the re movements and rhythms, which dist speed with freedom and of rrder to make visible red sites of what Rob Nixon has called “displacement without . As Sarah Sharma has argued, experiences of slowness and speed are thoroughly shaped by power relations, and reading the micropoli- ics of time and movement as they take shape in the novel, as I propose to thow that “maintaining a fiction of generalized effect transformative effect” (7071), an effect that literature can and deflect. The world literary reading that I propose reads uration by the forces of globalization in order to capture irreducibility to those forces. paradoxical 3. WORLDLY MOBILITY AND THE MOBILIZATION OF POTENTIALITY? In her study of the resurgence of the political novel in the early twenty-first century, Caren lrr notes that The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears par- ticipates in an ongoing mutation of African migration fiction. Like other such works, the novel turns “away from themes of cul s ” and instead elects to “map the restless. mobile contemporary subjects” face of emphasis fits the fami iterary migrant The Beaui ful Things duly documents the realities of transcontinental migration and terary and sophisticated, its mood melancholy86 Pieter Vermeulen logy alone. The novel shows how different forms y fail to map onto each other, and how the fric- tion herween these movements generate an intractable afc! that cannot be slorted as a reaity recognized emotional experience, even fits genre and its peritexts seem to promise such an experience. The novel, in other words, unleashes a particular affective dynamics t is generated through the novel’s imbrication with the chythms of cannot simply be th those rhythms. OF co muarantee that this, unruly dynamics will not be recuperated by f misalignment are elements that the approach I aims to capture. the markets and narrated by Sepha Stephanos, an Ethiopian shop on Logan Circle in Washington, D.C. This wel in a place and time that connects the end of the American Century to the realities of globalization, while the importation of African cultural memory into the capital of the United States locates the book at the juncture of postcolonial and world literature. The novel shows how migra- I an experience of being stuck in a place that is not home: es" (23) in the position of a witness who of the neighbour- immigeant melanchol figuring a dynamic that differences berweet ‘generic marker 1n voices” produced by global “the immigrant dhe characters are “well- book belongs to a“ i excels at“ ” giving voice’ experience”, it depits that experience accurately (th u berved" thanks to Mengest's “plausible depiction” of them); and because it manages to promote intercultural connection, as ‘moves the conversa- jow that often separates us,” oss-cultural incur tion forward” and cracks “open the dusty wi On World Literary Reading 87 iefal human connection.” The emphasis on a rariness not surprisingly echoes Tim Parks’ h which I begin this essay, of what he calls “the dull new If. we understand “genre,” with Lauren Berlant, as “an aes- ture of affective expectation” (4), these characterizations set up and emotive expectations that the novel will amply confirm in its first half, before it will go on to explore an unexpected new track in second hall, setting and three ofits main characters, le and experiences: we yet working as valets at immediately upstages this procedure of learn that the three African immigrants the Capital Hotel, and it w: “that Kenneth became Ken the Kenyan and Joseph, As for Sepha, being skinny in the 1980s was enough for Americans to (correctly) identify him as Ethiopian. Living ‘on the fringe of society, these three immigrants have adopted the idea that blending in is a process of persistent repetition: Ken has “come to believe that American men are so successful because they say the same thing over and over again” (2). Belonging, then, is a matter of endless repetitions of th same, and a failure to abide by these unwritten rules confirms one’s ma: ality. After an awkward dinner fh, a white professor with whom he strikes up a tenuous friendship when she comes to live in the neighbour- hood, Sepha beraces hi is “a case of attempt to “recast” himself as a different “type logic of strict cod marks the defini- Judith, as the black ns that threatens of these evictions, the novel underlines the pervasiveness and the destructiveness of the logic of categorical codification—a | the level of affect (which I understand as an impersonal, no non-signifying ‘The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears dramatizes the false promises of freedom and upward Sepha duly invests “two thousand dollars of borrowed money ... with the idea that perhaps [his] store could become a dela restaurant” and therefore a source of personal pride (3). Kenneth most enthusiastically embodies the conviction that individual, and ctuations in a seemingly random way of Judith and the white middle class she represents seems to herald a rising tide that will float soon leads to the ev ‘of most of his regular customers. In contrast, Sepha notes t never been more successful than in the days when it was88 Pieter Vermeulen prostitutes and their customers (38). The store again attracts large crowds in the first evictions and the subsequent incidents jal 1193). The wel offers no structural parallel between larger socio sends and personal profit, which puts pressure on the idea that there is a significant tclation between investment and reward, and on the ideology of upward ‘mobility that this meritocratic idea sustains. As a chastened Sepha remarks near the end of the novel: “I knew that there were pa but what Thad never understood until then was how insignificant a role we played in 1g them” (194). 1c novel addresses patterns of thinking, feeling, and moving on a the- decisively intervenes ith the capture of pot of the stasis that marks migrant seems “something that bordered on the m for the things that are dead or dying to remain so” (20! che novel mournfully assesses Sepha’s exclusion from these untapped potenti ants like him as lacking both substance and fre of us ... we wake to sleep and sleep to wake in contrast, has both substance liberty to move: “| wn by the s furniture she has inherited. If Sepha needs that endless repetition will end up synchronizing his movements to the pace of social change (68}—the way Judith’s daughter manages sips to match her mother's" (112)—Judith has the cu capital to keep moving and to avoid having to say “the same thing over and over to students who stayed the same age” (54) by leaving her teaching job. In the first half of the novel, then, the potential to construct a world out of the r the haves and is rigor- ously denied to to open up the possi lisation—o a significance in excess of movements the work chronicles. ‘The first half of the novel prepares for this different mode of mo! of pace and agency that On World Literary Reading 89 jomies of stasis and decisive action and to sent. Yet the novel only ceally becomes readable as world rather lual becomes the narrative’s main breaks the destructive thythm of his shop- mne day walks out of his shop and magnetically shadows ‘two random tourists who show up in the store, only to abandon them after a while and to travel on. The narrator's casual del his investment in the dream of upward mi without a conscious decis present tense, which forces readers he narrator's lack of foresight for the rest of the novel. The novel had earlier suggested that the idea that “there's a purpose, or even a real decision that turns ever fi the day Sepha wakes up with * jon” to finally get his act together, he is ice on his doorstep (65-66). himself ouside his store, Sepha for the first time experiences mol freedom, and precisely at the moment when the protoc the store ima the novel affirms that keeps al erature, in Pheng Cheah’s words, as“ the force that opens up another world, a force tha (Cheah, “What is a Worl tantly, this world of potentiality emerges from withi not by refusing them. This is one way in which the novel reconfigures the relations between potentiality and act as an effect of a temporary suspensi is achieved by in which what appears to be “suspended” is inverted into a higher-order “bearing,” refers to a line from Dante’s Commedia, which describes the poet’s vision when he is fina (99-100). In what simultaneously seems like a work of world Joseph reads time tries to rewri san evocation of the history of the Congo (169 . The attempt ge a productive relation between the memory of Africa and the present is an abiding concern for the novel.90. Pieter Vermeulen the three friends indulge in the “built-in nostalgic quality” (7) forded by an old map of Africa, to which they connect through touch and anthropomorphization (when “Africa’s hanging dour head looks like ‘woman's head wrapped in a shawl"; 7). They have developed a game in which they match African dictators with countries and coups. These memories overshadow present potentialities—they “supplant the present with their own incorrigible truth” (60), and keep the three immigrants from developing a more energizing encounter between past and present: “Coups, soldiers, famines were all a part of the same package of unending grief 499) in excess of mere reflection. The novel moves back and forth between the account of Sepha’s relationship with Judith, on the one hand, and mem- ries of Ethiopia, on the other. These latter are triggered by Sepha’s visit— again, not preceded by a definite decision—to the apartment of his ut ‘where he initially lived upon arriving in the States. Here, he remembers his memories of the atrocities he witnessed in Ethiopia—most notably, ther. These memories regain a marked vividness the corpses ant tense (127), until Sepha even addresses his dead father (176), which different from the stale dominance of the past that holds the characters in its grip until Sepha sers out on his walk. ‘As I underlined, the novel refers to the uncanny effect of dead things coming to life again (when it registers Sepha’s reaction to the renovation of Judith’s ‘as well as to the nostalgic powers of the past to haunt and ultimately disable the present; it is Sepha’s unwilled wandering that unlocks these potentials, robs them of their destructive force, and mobilizes them while le Sepha graduates altered relation to the pas phy of the novel; increasingly, experiences of Washingt ‘Abbis overlap; a motorcade on Logan Square mak has been temporarily suspended” (9: capitalizes on that suspension to compare it to earlier displays of impe thiopias a painted portrait of Frederick Douglass bears a striking resemblance to pictures of Haile Selassie (176); a park in Addis looks *just like Logan Circle does from a distance” (21 , the powers of distant vision afforded bby Sepha’s wandering—an by the novel's world-making inf inaugurate relations between ‘exclusive, but open-ended and seem “as if time BE aa a On World Literary Reading 91 the regained power to “clearly” sce the past spills over into the narrator's power to finally see his store for what it is (174). This is the difference between submission to the past and what Michael Rothberg has influentially called multidirectional memory, whi to “ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing” between differ. ent pasts and presents, and which in that way makes room for “complex acts of solidar rather than for the affirmation of ready-made emotions ions (3-11). From the perspective of a world tifies to the powers of the literary generate a world of po: ion, celebrations of cosmo- y and promises of readerly of worldly potenti even if it refuses to mistake that project for political intervention. as if, as Joshua Mostafa has remarked of Apter’s self-professed p uuntranslatability, “the critique of literature and tion of political commitment is pol isn’t. Yet even if wor offers one way to acces on between world and globe, Apter’ clision of this dis- inction when she reads wor wordsmaing, o inde the Untaneabls o which Apter devotes te chper( Menges’ novel was publish ‘spar of “Reading Alongiethe Market Ale and Mobi in Contemporcy American Migrant Fon” ina special sue of Textual Pracice onal iam and the nore WORKS CITED Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On tes of Untranslatabilty, London: : The Unfinished Business of Semtimentality ike University Press, 2008. Print. teat Marketplace London Palgrave, 2007. Pr an92 Pieter Vermeulen Brown, Nicholas, “The Work of Artin the Age of its Real Subsumption under Capital.” Nonsieor 1s Man 2 Web Ds tre abe ‘Cheah, Pheng. “What is a World? On World Literature as World-Making Activity.” etd 1373 20085 26-58, iter ses Ger Teval sNocnative Conception of Weld iran” Nac bteray ary 4853 201430329 Be ae ee ilobali Pe id Ce i Negoti Since and Intarvious 1971-201, Trane, Ensbath Retbeg enfod reales Tk EL Rama ah esl Anne Desh acl Dac) Sanford Sanford Unie res 2008 Pie 12) 485-500, Pe Hoven Als: Power of sin: Experimental American Weng since the 1960s ‘nfo: Oxo Unersy rs, 2011, Pr i Caren Toward he Genital Novel US Fctonn the Tent Fret Cony ‘work Columba Uns Pes, 201 3 Prin 1, Nc “lip Imerropuonse Ox Why Deena Prefers Mondiaiston 0 lotlason” CR: The Now Conte! Revise 7.2 (2007 sh-34 en Menges, Ding The Bel Tg, That Heaven Bears, New Yoke Reread Mostafa, Joshua. “Quand méme.” Rev, of Against World Literature by Emily Apter. ‘Sydney Reve of Books 13 Au 2013. We. 26 Now. 2044. MafiyAamir R“Ortasm andthe stun of World Litres gry 83 20105 498-93. Pe Nandy Jean-Luc, The Greton ofthe World vr lbbalation. Tans Feangis lfgal and David Penton, Aany sae Univesity of New Yor Pres 2007, Pit Nealon Jey T:Por-Fstmoderniom: Or The Cultural Logic of Js in-Time Copan, Sanford: Sanford Univers Dress, 2012, in inom Ro Sw Vince andthe Entonmentlion of tbe Poor. Cambridge Critical Harvard University Press, 2011. Print Packs, Tim. “The Dul 2014, New Global Novel” NYR Blog 9 Feb. 2010. Web. 26 Nov. and David Pettigrew. “Transator’s Introduction” The Creation of a Raffoul and David ity of New York Press, 2007, 1-26, Pint. Rothberg, Michacl. Mutidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the "Age of De Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Print sharma, Sarah nthe Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Poitis. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014 Prin. \Walkowite,Rebece, "Close Reading in an Age of Global Writing” Modern Language Quarterly 74.2 (2013): 171-95. Prin. 6 World Literature and Market Dynamics! Sarah Brouillette 1 There is a popular take on the market for world recounting here in a very summary way. While | will not suggest that this take has no validity, I will argue that, in failing to stress the most press- ing and most basic material circumstances that determine how literature is made and read, this story tends to ignore what matters most to the indus- try’s organization and self-conception. What matters most is not the fact that world literature is a consumable commodity constrained hy market demand. It is rather that the whole system of literary production is funda- ‘mentally determined by unevenly developed capitalist social relations. Put simply, these relations dictate that only some relatively privileged individu- als are engaged in the production and circulation of literature. Part of what | argue in what follows is that recognition of the division of labour under capitalism and of the iniquitous and uneven nature of literary production and reception is actually more important to a materialist critique of world licerature than endlessly recounting the story of the commodification of cul- tural difference for elite consumers, erature that I will be 2 Scholars have been discussing world literature’s status as an elite commod- ity for a number of years now, beginning perhaps with Timothy Brennan’s important critiques, first expressed in the late 1980s, of celebrated “Third World” writers (“Cosmopolitans and Celebrities,” Salman Rushdie). Since then a number of studies of postcolonial literature—a category of texts that tends to be subsumed into the world literature canon—have argued for the importance of understanding that literature in relation to the markets for Grouillette, Postcolonial Writers; Huggan; Watts). It recently became especially hard to avoid this concern, however, after Verso published Emily Apter’s Against World Literature and an editorial appeared in the widely read cultural magazine n+1 under the title “World Lite” (both in 2013). The basic narrative that these latter works construct is one in which the