Cartographies of Dissent (52.2)

Resistance and Revolution in the Transnational Imaginary
52.2, Fall/Winter 2014
Karim Mattar, Editor

 

In recent years, the transitive practice of 鈥渨orlding鈥 literary studies has often, implicitly or explicitly, presupposed a globalized cartography. Global literary forms are symbolically mediated in the peripheries of the world-system (Moretti); global cultural capitals bestow the status of 濒颈迟迟茅谤补谤颈迟茅 on the otherwise not-quite-literatures of the world (Casanova); global cosmopolitan norms determine the ethico-political viability of third-world texts for domestic audiences (Brennan); global literary markets publish postcolonial texts on the basis of their exotic or authentic commercial appeal (Brouillette, Huggan); and globalization itself, its capitalist sublime, demands the reinvention of comparative literature from a planetary perspective (Spivak). Et cetera. While certainly critical, such approaches bear the largely unacknowledged, unexamined weight of a cartographic imagination that has been historically in the service of the very structures of power they criticize. As early as Orientalism, Edward Said foregrounded the overlaps between the cartographic impulse, what he called 鈥渋maginative geography鈥, and the imperial impulse to designate boundaries and define others. Along with the category of 鈥渓iterature鈥 itself as forged in the crucible of philological orientalism (Mufti), can what might be called 鈥渃artographic orientalism鈥 also be considered part of the political unconscious of world literature? Through its globalized cartography, does world literature inevitably, as Djelal Kadir suggests, 鈥渃ircumscribe the world into manageable global boundedness鈥?

This special issue of English Language Notes builds on the previous, 鈥淚maginary Cartographies鈥 (ELN 52.1, Spring/Summer 2014), edited by Karen Jacobs, but seeks to redirect its investigation of cartography to the problematic of world literature. The questions of geographical scale, historical scope, and methodology that have animated this field might, we contend, be fruitfully reassessed through close critical attention to the uses and misuses of mapping therein. Through such attention, we aim to envision alternative cartographies of world literature, what we call 鈥渃artographies of dissent,鈥 that cut across, intersect, or elude the circuits of globalization.