Extractive Modernity at Large

Abstract

The history of primitive accumulation, and Marx’s treatment of it, has in recent decades acquired a heightened critical resonance. Postcolonial thinkers have called attention to the persistence of colonial relations and processes in the moment of their supposed negation. Theorists of contemporary capitalism, meanwhile, have accented the reenactment, in the present, of putatively primordial modes of depredation. Primitive accumulation has likewise become a core concern of “world literature”, a cultural form – and hermeneutic orientation – that apprehends something of the world in its totality, the planetary shape or local articulation of the global capitalist order brought into being by empire and its afterlives. A unique strand of contemporary world literature, the novel of primitive accumulation traces the routes of continuity between original and latter-day histories of dispossession – the history of the present, and the presence of the past. The two novels I consider in this essay, Hernán Diaz’s In the Distance (2017) and Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s Tram 83 (2015), realize this two-fold ambit with a distinctive cogency. They represent, in particular, the advent and contemporary expression of what I want to call extractive modernity at large. Read together, these two novels reveal how the time–space of extraction is diffuse and perpetually reprised – even as they register its located origins and impacts. In so doing, these novels help clarify the particular languages of critique and struggle that emerge within, and begin to imagine a way beyond, both acute sites or instances of dispossession and the deeper, enduring history of primitive accumulation, its extractive forms in particular.