Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature by Warwick Research Collective (WReC)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literatureby Warwick Research Collective (WReC) Caitlin Vandertop (bio) Warwick Research Collective (WReC): Sharae Deckard, Nicholas Lawrence, Neil Lazarus, Graeme MacDonald, Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, Benita Parry, and Stephen Shapiro. Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature. Liverpool UP, 2015. Pp. 256. £19.99. The recent study from the Warwick Research Collective (WReC) intervenes in current debates in world literature by highlighting a general failure within the disciplines of postcolonial and world literary studies to interrogate the subject of capitalism. While approaches such as the "alternative modernities" paradigm have affirmed a cultural pluralism in recent years, the materialist framework presented in Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literatureunderscores the factors that continue to limit the texts and languages that are published, taught, and circulated within an uneven literary marketplace. By emphasizing "the context of capitalism as a world-system" (WReC 14), the Collective articulates an understanding of modernity as a singular and global phenomenon without precluding heterogeneity and difference. They are thereby able to address a series of timely questions: How, firstly, to reject Eurocentrism without recourse to a concept of postcolonial difference that loses sight of the global universality of capitalism's origins and effects? How to configure modernity as a phenomenon that is both irreducibly specific to individual locations and relational, insofar as it is formed in and through the colonial relationship? And how, finally, to make postcolonial critique sensitive to the uneven structures, institutions, and markets that continue to shape the possibilities of world literature? The Warwick study provides a way into these questions with its suggestive focus on combined and uneven development, a theory initially introduced by Leon Trotsky in his studies of early-twentieth-century semi-colonial Russia and China to explain the "amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms" (qtd. in WReC 11). Trotsky's work shows how the spaces transformed by capitalist or capitalizing social relations continued to sustain rural populations, subsistence agriculture, and traditional social dependencies. Such phenomena were not simply the legacy of archaic cultural practices or psychic characteristics but were actively kept in place and reproduced. The result, according to Trotsky, was a hybrid landscape of modernity and tradition that saw "industrial plants built alongside 'villages of wood and straw'; and peasants 'thrown into the factory cauldron snatched directly from the [End Page 189]plow'" (qtd. in WReC 11). One of the most striking examples of combined unevenness mentioned in the Warwick study is the rapidly expanding cities of semi-colonial China in the nineteenth century. The authors draw on Liu Kang's account of the development of colonial enclaves and port cities such as Shanghai and Peking, where the latest evolutions in production, commerce, and finance were introduced under the control of imperial powers who were "actively propping up an archaic landholding system, and supporting landlords, officials, militarists, and comprador elites in prolonging prior forms of social organisation" (WReC 11). Modernization in such spaces is revealed to be a process of uneven development that involves industrialization and urbanization in certain areas and the "development of underdevelopment" in others (13). By drawing on these landscapes of uneven development, the Warwick Research Collective complicates the developmentalist narratives inherent to globalization and stagist-Marxist discourses alike—whether these celebrate the spread of capitalism as a "tide lifting all boats" or affirm the belatedness of "primitive" accumulation in the face of capital's inevitable universalization (22). In contrast to both positions, the Collective suggests that capitalism "does not smooth away but rather producesunevenness, systematically," such that the idea of an "achieved" modernity—in which unevenness is "superseded, harmonised, vanquished, or ironed out"—is "radically unhistorical" (12–13; emphasis in original). As with the uneven landscapes of the capitalist world-system, so with the uneven "world" of world literature: here, too, the Warwick Research Collective rejects the idea of a "level playing field"—"a more or less free space in which texts from around the globe can circulate, intersect and converse with one another"—as an "idealist fantasy" that they identify in the work of a number of literary comparativists, including Jonathan Culler...