World Literature and the Geographies of Resistance by Joel Nickels

Abstract

MLR, .,   third part of Cohen’s study argues that, although European literature aer the fieenth century took on a decidedly imperial cast, ‘the central mode of representation of empire in Renaissance literature is nonrepresentation’ (p. ). Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis () is both touchstone and counterpoint here as elsewhere in this study. e nineteenth-century European novel is presented as inseparable from its non-mimetic engagement with empire, resulting in what Cohen calls ‘the severing of the relationship between the European novel and the world beyond Europe’ (p. ), though, as later chapters argue, this is not necessarily the case for nineteenth-century poetry. In the study’s final part, Cohen offers a superb chapter which persuasively argues that Jewishness constitutes modernism’s most significant demographic component, before claiming Jewish modernist literature as the demarcation point of European literature’s return to ‘world literature’. If the study’s final chapter on ‘world literature’, with its survey of contemporary Anglophone and translated literature, feels flat compared with earlier chapters, this is perhaps indicative of the conceptual limitations of the frequently all too nebulous term ‘world literature’ itself, such as the tendency of an infinitely capacious approach to obscure the specificities of literary works and languages. Cohen’s remark that ‘if prose fiction from around the world now draws centrally on Western forms, and especially on the novel, why not see all of it as Western literature?’ (p. ) may be troublingly worded, but is answered with the declaration that European literature’s expansionist vocation leads to its simultaneous fulfilment and abolition in the category of ‘world literature’ (p. ). e future viability of both ‘European literature’ and ‘world literature’ as hermeneutic categories is thereby put into question. Especially in the current political climate, however, this monograph is a timely intervention, which emphasizes the enduring significance of European culture within a wider context without shying away from its troubled history. Cohen succeeds admirably in delineating and magnifying the story he sets out to tell—one version of events, to be sure, but a compelling and insightful one. His championing of comparative literary criticism that pays attention synchronically and diachronically to the formal properties of languages in literary works is also welcome. Even at the risk of fragmentation, reading widely and deeply remains as rewarding as ever. U  L I E World Literature and the Geographies of Resistance. By J N. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. . ix+ pp. £. ISBN ––– –. at world literature is read as an embodiment of liberal cosmopolitan universalism is well known. at postcolonial literature is approached as a critique of colonialism and as an embodiment of nationalist revolution is equally familiar. But to read world literature as resistance literature and postcolonial texts as more than a corollary of nationalist revolution is less common. For that reason, this monograph by Joel Nickels makes a significant contribution to the field of world literature.  Reviews Nickels’s book is a continuation of the project of subaltern studies, in that it deals with areas le out of traditional approaches to world literature, reading world texts and authors as offering alternatives to existing state-controlled, capitalist , and communist spaces. To illustrate his new approach, Nickels argues that world literature, read as a site of resistance, can help us to imagine alternatives to existing hegemonic systems. In this study he is able to establish a connection between various forms of non-state space in the twentieth century and their counterparts in the twenty-first. His contention is that there is no clear rupture when the world mutates from older moments of colonialism into neocolonialism. e main focus of the book is on various fiction and non-fiction texts that help us to imagine non-state space—sites of self-government and resistance that are external to state-centric forms of power—as represented in workers’ organizations , mass strikes, alternative governance systems, and mutual aid networks, all of which contribute to challenging international power relations, institutions, and their bureaucracies. To explore such ideas, Nickels deals with the works of writers representing different parts of the world and different periods: Patrick Chamoiseau, Ousmane Sembene, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Claude McKay, Arundhati Roy, T. S...