Introduction: Globalizing the Province: Rethinking Place and Scale

Abstract

Globalizing the Province: Rethinking Place and Scale Shirley Lau Wong (bio) “The menace of this kind of provincialism is, that we can all, all the peoples on the globe, be provincials together.” T.S. Eliot, “What Is a Classic?” (1944) I In a lecture titled, “The Sense of Place,” Seamus Heaney laments what he sees as the diminishing presence of Ireland in the work of contemporary Irish poetry as new generations of poets slowly unmoor their identity from the country’s landscape.1 Replacing the “sense of place” is a deterritorialized perception of Irish identity, according to Heaney. “We are no longer innocent, we are no longer parishioners of the local,” he bemoans, “We go to Paris at Easter instead of rolling eggs on the hill at the gable [...] ‘It’s a far cry from the Moy’” (148).2 While Heaney expresses his concern with some degree of irony, there is nonetheless a zero-sum game at work in his nostalgia: for him, a globalized identity always comes at the expense of a local identity. It seems that the Irish poet cannot have Paris and the Moy, too. A similar story is told in world literature scholarship. In her seminal study La république mondiale du lettres (The World Republic of Letters), Pascale Casanova argues that literary space is rife with power struggles over the authority to dictate the criteria of what’s “modern” and to determine the “very nature of literature” (12). Indeed, such rivalries constitute her concept of the world republic of letters, and works of world literature are marked by their universality or autonomy above political, linguistic, and national divisions. Quoting Valéry Laubaurd, Casanova claims that Paris acts as the “Greenwich meridian of literature” because it can proclaim itself “beyond all ‘local’ politics, whether sentimental or economic” (29–30). Those writers who fail to disassociate from their national or regional identities are consigned to the “hell of minor provincial roles” (23), ghettoized as representatives of peripheral cultures rather than as legitimate participants in the literary sphere: “‘National’ writers [...] whether [End Page 1] they live in central or outlying countries, are united in ignoring world competition (and therefore literary time) and in considering only the local norms and limits assigned to literary practice by their homelands” (94).3 Heaney mourns precisely what Casanova seems to celebrate: the eschewing of “local norms and limits” in favor of the boundlessly and timelessly global. Of course, these two writers could not come from more different perspectives or be guided by more different motivations. Delivering his lecture in 1977 at the height of sectarian violence during the Troubles, Heaney expresses his anxieties under a set of more urgent political pressures. Heaney admits that the so-called “sense of place” (the term he uses to describe the intimate relationship between place and literature) is by no means an exclusively Irish phenomenon, but the poet also observes that the “peculiar fractures in our history, north and south and [...] possession of the land and possession of different languages” have made it a pressing priority at this moment of Irish history (136). Meanwhile, Casanova remains more agnostic to what she assesses as a now centuries-long history of the world republic of letters. Nonetheless, Heaney and Casanova present two sides of the same and now very familiar narrative, which posits globalization as a one-way street that threatens to expunge local and indigenous practices of traditional ways of life. Contrary though their outlooks may be, they nevertheless conceive of the local and global as antagonistic categories of literary identity. But are the local and global as incommensurable as Heaney and Casanova believe them to be? Taking this question as its starting point, this special issue of The Global South interrogates cultural and political representations of “local” spaces and communities, as well as other zones of underdevelopment more broadly. This issue’s essays focus on local, provincial, and regional cultures of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that are shaped by, but also elided from, the perspective of the national and transnational. As has become clear, the scale of literary analysis is no longer stable, especially as the nation-state and world are no longer...