Compressions of Scale: World Literature in Miniature

Abstract

Fifty years ago, in 1966, Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey published a famous book called The Tyranny of Distance that argued how spatial distance from other centers of civilization had been the most important factor in determining the trajectory of Australian history. Now, under the impact of communications revolutions and environmental theory of various kinds, such tyrannies are more likely to be those of propinquity, with scholars of world literature and culture intent upon examining ways in which different parts of the globe are now, and indeed always have been, tightly imbricated within one another’s orbits. Lisa Lowe’s The Intimacies of Four Continents is a distinguished contribution to these contemporary critical discourses of planetary scale, with Lowe being particularly incisive in her deconstruction of what she calls “the violence of liberal universality” (7). One purpose of her book is to show how it was an Anglo American cultural tradition, “best exemplified” by John Stuart Mill (106), that provided a key rationale not only for the expansion in the nineteenth century of an international trade in manufactured goods and migrant labor, but also, more implicitly, for styles of writing that worked as a corollary to such rhetorical invocations of liberty. Lowe has an excellent discussion in her second chapter of Olaudah Equiano, where she challenges the received idea of “transition” upon which his Narrative (1789) is predicated, along with its associated suggestion “that the system of slavery was gradually superseded by a new system of free wage labor” (46). She argues instead that slavery and “free” wage labor are closely intertwined with each other, with autobiography, “the liberal genre par excellence,” performing “the important work of mediating and resolving liberalism’s contradictions” (46). Lowe has done much productive research for this project in colonial archives, and she illuminatingly juxtaposes Lord Aberdeen’s 1841 declaration, in a letter to the first governor of Hong Kong, that “a secure, well-regulated trade, not conquest, is all we desire” with the twentieth-century “imperial governmentality” of the US, which was similarly less concerned with “direct conquest or occupation of territory” than with “managing the biopolitical circulation of goods and peoples within an expanded international market” (132).