Critique Of Global Capitalism Research Articles

The Mozambican Modern Ghost Story (1866–2006): The Genealogy of a Genre by Peter J. Maurits

Reviewed by: The Mozambican Modern Ghost Story (1866–2006): The Genealogy of a Genre by Peter J. Maurits Thomas Waller Peter J. Maurits, The Mozambican Modern Ghost Story (1866–2006): The Genealogy of a Genre (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2022). 214 pages. Print and ebook. xiv + 214 pages. There is a long and high-quality tradition of English-language scholarship on Mozambican literature. The landmark publications of Hilary Owen's Mother Africa, Father Marx and Phillip Rothwell's A Postmodern Nationalist in the early 2000s set the benchmark for subsequent work in the field by analysing the subversion and redefinition of narratives of Mozambican nationhood, and the deconstruction of discourses of gender and sexuality, in the work of authors such as Noémia de Sousa, Lília Momplé, Paulina Chiziane, and Mia Couto. More recently, monographs by Eleanor Jones, Ana Margarida Martins, and Maria Tavares have carried forward this line of research with new work engaging the theory of biopolitics, the publishing dynamics of the global literary marketplace, and the legacy of the anti-colonial nationalist movement in Mozambique. While there are points of divergence and disagreement within this scholarship, two of its characteristic features are a preoccupation with the category of national identity and a theoretical affinity with postcolonial studies, a field in which the experiences of Portuguese-speaking African societies have historically been either under-represented or ignored. Each in their own [End Page 96] way, these scholars read Mozambican literature through the framework of the postcolonial nation-state, which the texts are then seen alternately to challenge, re-examine, contest, or deconstruct. Peter J. Maurits's new book The Mozambican Modern Ghost Story approaches Mozambican literature from a different perspective. Published in Peter Lang's book series 'Reconfiguring Identities in the Portuguese-speaking World', its orientation does not come from postcolonial theory, nor is it principally concerned with the themes of gender and sexuality, and while it has much to say about the trajectory of Mozambican nationhood, its scope transcends the bounding limits of the national framework to encompass a global horizon of political economy. The structure of the book is organized in five chapters of more or less equal length. The first chapter introduces key concepts and summarizes the monograph's thesis, that there exists a 'Mozambican modern ghost story'. The second chapter then presents the category of the modern ghost story through an analysis of the work of Walter Scott, with a particular focus on his 1827 short story 'The Highland Widow'. The third chapter identifies prototypes of the Mozambican modern ghost story in the work of the nineteenth-century poet Campos de Oliveira and in Orlando Mendes's important 1966 episodic novel Portagem. The fourth chapter theorizes the consolidation of the Mozambican modern ghost story proper in the period of the late 1980s, when Mozambique was transitioning from Marxism-Leninism to free-market capitalism. Finally, the fifth chapter argues, through a close reading of Mia Couto's novel O outro pé da sereia, that the Mozambican modern ghost story re-emerged in the first decade of the twenty-first century to respond to the economic effects of neoliberal globalization. One of the virtues of Maurits's book is that it engages with two traditions that have received relatively short shrift in English-language work on Mozambican literature: Marxist social theory and world-literary studies. The first two sentences of The Mozambican Modern Ghost Story establish its argument at the outset at the intersection of these two fields: 'This book will argue that a Mozambican modern ghost story exists and that it registers primitive accumulation. It shows how literary form—a genre—can alter when it moves, temporally and spatially, through the world-literary system, and reacts with different forms and raw materials' (p. ix). A materialist commitment to the theory and critique of global capitalism is thereby paired with a sensitivity to the unevenness of the production and circulation of world-literary texts in a system stratified by power and inequality. Whereas the former preoccupation leads Maurits to theories of the aesthetic mediation of capitalist social form, and to the likes of Fredric Jameson and Pierre Macherey, the latter leads him to world...

Universalism and the Malaysian anglophone novel: Exploring inequality, migrancy, and class in Tash Aw’s We, the Survivors

ABSTRACT Tash Aw’s 2019 novel We, the Survivors narrates the story of a convicted killer, Ah Hock, whose life serves as a lens to refract contemporary Malaysia’s postcolonial history and its ethnic and class politics, as well as its location within the circuitry of global capitalism. This article examines Aw’s representation of migrancy, class, and inequality in contemporary Malaysian society, reading the text as a critique of global capitalism through its tactical employment of a universalist idiom that appropriates Darwinian ideas about survival, evolution, chance, environment, and competition. The text also reflects on the ethics of novel-writing since Ah Hock’s oral testimony is ostensibly mediated by a more privileged character. Aw locates his novel in the pivotal space between national specificity and general universalism while asking critical questions of his own position within the transnational literary marketplace, thereby underscoring the urgent need to re-world the world created by global capitalism.

Narratives of Inequality: Postcolonial Literary Economics.

Whereas postcolonial criticism might have been entrapped into culturalism and identity politics, the novel, at least its best specimens, continues to address the more fundamental question of economic inequality whose relevance has been rediscovered since the 2008 financial crisis – or so Melissa Kennedy asserts in her latest book, Narratives of Inequality. The book offers an extensive survey of postcolonial fiction across different historical times and locations. Convinced that literary studies should play an important role in the critique of global capitalism along the lines of Thomas Piketty and Amartya Sen, Kennedy selects novels that explicitly handle economic vocabulary and subject-matter. According to her, these works register the same or similar structures of inequality regardless of their specific local, historical, and cultural contexts.

The European Intellectual Origins of the Alt-Right

This article places the intellectual inspirations behind the white nationalism of the Alt-Right in a Transatlantic context. It does so by first focusing on the late 1960s and the rise of New Right Movements throughout Europe that sprang up as a response to the New Left, which involved a hatred of liberal internationalism and multiculturalism, a thorough critique of global capitalism, and, in one way or another, promoted an identitarian form of race-based politics. The pivotal New Right figure here is Alain de Benoist whose key ideas this paper will summarize. The paper then shows how Benoist’s thought made its way into United States by the 1990s. I will conclude by unpacking a strange argument that it was in fact cultural Marxists, and specifically European emigre thinkers fleeing the Nazis, who provided a model for how the alt-Right could pursue a cultural revolution that would overthrow liberal understandings of race and identity

J. Hillis Miller

J. Hillis Miller Jakob Lothe (bio) J. Hillis Miller made very important contributions to critical trends as different as phenomenology, deconstruction, and narrative ethics. He also made a significant contribution to Conrad studies. Over the course of a career that lasted from the mid-1950s until 2020, Miller turned, and returned, to Conrad’s fiction, reading, rereading, and discussing key texts in the light of theoretical developments to which he had himself contributed. If Miller’s strong and lasting interest in Conrad says something about the range of his critical interests, it also tells us something about the narrative sophistication and thematic richness of Conrad’s fiction. When John G. Peters and I co-edited Miller’s Reading Conrad (The Ohio State University Press, 2017), we were forcibly struck by Miller’s demonstration of the ways in which Conrad’s fiction responds to varying critical approaches. While Miller draws on aspects of phenomenology in his discussion of The Secret Agent in Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers (1965), an essay entitled “The Interpretation of Lord Jim” (1970) signals his critical move from phenomenology towards deconstruction. There is a link between this essay and his chapter on Lord Jim in Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (1982). There is also a connection between both these discussions and narrative hermeneutics as represented by the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer. In Truth and Method, first published in German as Wahrheit und Methode in 1960, Gadamer argues that not only do we as readers interpret the same text differently, but the text itself contains interpretative elements that influence the reader’s interpretation. Lord Jim is an excellent example of such a text since the novel’s characters and narrators give varying, in part conflicting, interpretations of the main character Jim. Miller’s interpretation of these interpretations is thoughtful and thought-provoking. While Miller’s literary criticism is consistently textual in its orientation, his studies of Conrad reveal a growing interest in, and focus on, elements of context and history. To put this another way, he becomes increasingly interested in the way in which the fiction is framed. Thus, while in an essay on Heart of Darkness from 1985 he writes of the narrative of Heart of Darkness as a general or unspecified process of unveiling, his interpretation of the same literary text [End Page 219] in an essay published in 2002 makes him consider Heart of Darkness as a critique of imperialism. Similarly, the essay “ ‘Material Interests’: Nostromo as a Critique of Global Capitalism” (2008) pays more attention to this novel’s historical context than his earlier discussions of Lord Jim. This historical contextualizing is linked not just to crucial aspects of Conrad’s time but also to the situation of the critic and his readers. To use a key concept from Gadamer’s Truth and Method, Miller is acutely aware of his own horizon. For Gadamer, the reader’s and the critic’s horizon signal a kind of limitation, yet also suggest a critical possibility as the critic can say something about a literary text from his or her own perspective. Miller’s studies of Conrad are a critically productive, and remarkably original, combination of his horizon as a reader, as a critic, and as a human being. Miller’s contribution to the project “Narrative Theory and Analysis” that I ran at the Centre for Advanced Study, Oslo, in 2005–06 proved invaluable. He wrote excellent chapters for the three books (all of them published by The Ohio State University Press) in which the project resulted: Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre (2008), Franz Kafka: Narration, Rhetoric, and Reading (2011), and After Testimony: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Narrative for the Future (2012). While his chapter in After Testimony is linked to The Conflagration of Community: Fiction before and after Auschwitz (2011), his contribution to Joseph Conrad is related to, and forms part of the basis for, a long chapter on Nostromo in Communities in Fiction (2015). Entitled “Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community,” and dedicated to the memory of Edward W. Said, this chapter is interestingly linked to Said’s discussion of Nostromo in Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975). Moreover, during...

A Cultural Ambassador East and West: J. Hillis Miller’s Lectures in China

A Cultural Ambassador East and West: J. Hillis Miller’s <i>Lectures in China</i>

Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism

Slavoj Žižek continues his idiosyncratic critique of global capitalism, democratic culture, and neoliberal ideology in his latest 400+ page tome, Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of dialectical Materialism, which promises to provide, much like his Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (Verso, 2012), a resolutely idealist “new foundation” for dialectical materialism. This is a promise that Žižek has made for some years now, since what we might call his “system” turn became manifest in the publication of a series of major books (In Defense of Lost Causes [Verso, 2008]; Living in the End Times, Less than Nothing [Verso, 2010]; and now Absolute Recoil) that at once synthesize, repeat, elaborate, and interconnect diverse reflections on a bewildering variety of philosophical themes, cultural events, and political debates. These reflections often first appear in online journal publications or op-ed pieces, and in shorter, more coherent, pamphlet-book form (First as Tragedy, Then as Farce [Verso, 2009], Violence: Six Sideways Reflections [Picador, 2008], and Event: A Philosophical Journey through a Concept [Penguin, 2014]). As readers of Žižek will know, there is a shameless recycling, reiterating, and recasting of ideas from these shorter pieces within the longer books, which have what we might describe as musical “theme and variation” structure, with recurring themes that return in different contexts, subtly altered or reintegrated into different lines of thought. This is rather different from the more traditional model of a sequentially organized, teleologically directed, logical argument. It is one of the reasons for the perplexity many critics feel when confronted by his books, as compared with the more conventional “essayistic” style of his shorter works.

Before the Bride Really Wore Pink

Before the Bride Really Wore Pink

Taking sides: cosmopolitanism, internationalism and ‘complex solidarity’ in the work of Fred Halliday

Fred Halliday's life and work were intimately associated with the theory and practice of internationalism. In his later writings, the notion of ‘complex solidarity’ emerges as a key component of Halliday's worldview. This article explores the conceptual interconnections between different historical expressions of internationalism, cosmopolitanism and solidarity. It considers the intricate relationship between these categories and their place in our understanding of international affairs, emphasizing the divergence between liberal and revolutionary conceptions of internationalism and cosmopolitanism. The article discusses diverse understandings of ‘solidarity’ in International Relations, arguing that beyond the cosmopolitan and communitarian approaches, there exist other ‘Grotian’ and ‘republican’ ideas of solidarity. Halliday drew on these to present his own defence of universal human rights and solidarity, arguably developing a distinctive brand of republican internationalism. The latter part of the article gives content to ‘complex solidarity’ by suggesting it is built on three inter-related components: a methodological internationalism, an egalitarian reciprocity and a critique of global capitalism. Overall, these guiding features of complex solidarity deliver a unique rendition of internationalism which reflect Halliday's eclectic combination of radical liberalism with a residual historical materialism.