A conversation with Timothy Brennan

Abstract

ABSTRACT This interview was conducted in 2022 as part of a series of wide-ranging conversations via email with the prominent American public intellectual and activist Timothy Brennan, whose literary and cultural criticism, secular humanism, and critique of cosmopolitanism have from the late 1980s onwards influenced perceptions of postcolonial studies and “World Literature”. Preoccupied with the intellectual and philosophical praxis, dynamics, malignity, and drawbacks of metropolitan cosmopolitanism, “World Literature”, and world system, Brennan here grapples robustly and critically with the literary and intellectual history of Marxism, Hegel, modernity, and ecocriticism. He also explores digital literature; Ibn Khaldun’s secular affiliations; Edward Said’s places of mind; modernity; and world system in the US empire, the UK, India, Asia, and elsewhere. He maps out an original and thought-provoking analysis of antinomian and anti-colonial genealogy of cultural studies, modernity, pedagogy, secular humanism, and the role of the intellectual in academia and beyond.