Readers of an American literary journal like Novel might be forgiven for wondering why Sarah Brouillette would devote several years of study to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. Can one seriously expect to discover “the fate of the literary” lurking in the reports, proceedings, and verbose declarations of UNESCO? Cultural policy studies has been a dynamic field of interdisciplinary research and theory for more than three decades now. But its leading figures have been in Australia and, to a lesser extent, Europe and the United Kingdom, while scholars in North America have remained on the sidelines. This is especially true among literary scholars, of whom even the more sociologically inclined have shown little interest in exploring the role that institutions and agencies of cultural policy might play in the production of literary values, hierarchies, and dispositions or in the ways these serve as stealth modes of governance. There are of course exceptions: Joseph Slaughter and George Yudice are two important contributors who come to mind. Still, one can fairly say that UNESCO, which rates a string of entries in the index to almost any book of cultural policy studies, is barely a blip on our discipline's radar screen.This is no minor blind spot. Though literature represents just one slice of UNESCO's giant portfolio, its literary endeavors over the last seventy-five years have by any standard been far-reaching and profound. It spearheaded the massive curation, translation, and publishing project known as the Collection of Representative Works, in effect constructing the postwar canon of world literature in translation. It has gathered, maintained, and disseminated some of the world's most authoritative longitudinal data, now extending across more than two hundred countries, on literary publishing and translation, import/export and the retail book trade, rates of literacy and library use, the expansion and contraction of college-level literary studies, and much else of value for literary historical research. Along with the World Bank and other partners in the United Nations system, it has injected many billions of dollars into literary enterprises, from distribution of books and support for literary instruction in impoverished villages of the Global South to promotion of Cities of Literature and celebration of successful novelists in the wealthy nations of Europe.Brouillette's book thus offers literary scholars an overdue and eye-opening look into the very bourse of world literary policy making. She manages to convey the high interest, deep import, and sheer quantity of the cultural business UNESCO has transacted since 1945 without letting her narrative bog down in the minutiae of bureaucratic administration and procedure, a common hazard for less critically engaged scholars of institutional history. The history Brouillette recounts is nothing if not fiercely critical. Indeed, if you are hoping the fate of literature might yet turn out to be a happy one, in which literary works play a large and active role in the pursuit of social betterment, this book will put paid to any such “pipe dream” (142). For all UNESCO's good intentions—and Brouillette credits it as “one of the premiere sites [of] dispositional wariness towards capitalist modernization and development” (14)—she is clear that it could never really operate except as a piece of cultural machinery within the capitalist world system. Though UNESCO's policy interventions have helped to maintain for world literature a certain elevation, a symbolic position above and beyond mere market values, this prestige has largely served to flatter cultural elites and advance the interests of media monopolists in the rich nations of the West. And even that position of dubious privilege is fast eroding these days, as the remorseless logic of neoliberal calculation leaves little room of any sort for literary culture or its aging and deluded champions.This sharp critique of the literary world system and its leading policy makers is presented in three parts, corresponding to the three “signal phases” of UNESCO's history (10). First was the immediate postwar period, dominated by a liberal internationalist consensus in terms of which cosmopolitan culture generally and world literature in particular were viewed as key to the liberal democratic overcoming of communist and totalitarian tendencies. These were the years that saw UNESCO launch the Collection of Representative Works, a program designed to identify highly valued works from cultures around the world and support their translation into the major European languages of literature and diplomacy, chiefly English and French. The idea, as Brouillette describes it, was that wide access to this “global cultural storehouse” would encourage reverence for the value of “unity amidst diversity” around which a new “sympathetic global community committed to enlightened liberal democratic capitalism” would inevitably concert itself (139, 144).By the late 1960s, this Cold War fantasy of harmonious difference nurtured by the universal values found in great books had begun to unravel in the face of continuing massive inequities in cultural and economic power. UNESCO now entered a second phase in which it effectively reversed course, launching a series of new programs and policy initiatives that implied “a rejection . . . of much of what the Collection of Representative Works represented” (140). Throughout the 1970s, says Brouillette, its major endeavors partook of “significantly anti-imperialist, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist” elements, aiming toward the establishment of “some kind of genuinely balanced or ‘humanized’ system of cultural production and exchange” (140), what came to be termed the New World Information and Communication Order. Had it passed into concrete policy, the NWICO would among other things have boosted indigenous publishing infrastructures by placing national limits on the global application of copyright law. Piracy, after all, has always been a necessary first step toward establishing adequate capacity for domestic book production. But the major media conglomerates had no intention of allowing “statists” at the UN to derail their quest for ever more consolidated control over intellectual property. By the mid-1980s their concerted lobbying of the Thatcher and Reagan administrations led first the US and then Britain to withdraw entirely from UNESCO.The loss of these heavy underwriters (who between them provided 30 percent of UNESCO's funding) spelled the end of the organization's drive for greater balance of exchange and ushered in the third phase of its history, which extends to the present day. Since the early 1990s UNESCO has steadily retreated from the NWICO agenda of more open access, even going so far as to name its annual day of literary celebration World Book and Copyright Day. Its most substantial literary initiative of the new century has been to designate thirty-nine Cities of Literature within the Creative Cities Network, an unapologetic attempt to install literature as a profit-seeking element of “brandable cultural heritage” (11) through promotion of literary festivals, author-themed historic sites and attractions, architecturally distinctive libraries, and other potential lures for tourist dollars. UNESCO's once utopian policy rhetoric has been retooled to blend smoothly with business jargon and creative-industry clichés: the value added from public-private partnerships, creativity as a powerful driver of economic growth in a globalizing world, and so on. The most that the literary world can hope for, it seems, are busier tills in the author-museum gift shops.Of these three main phases in UNESCO's history, it is the middle one that appears, at first, most propitious. The late sixties and seventies, Brouillette says, were “the era of the real flourishing of cultural policy as a site of political possibility” (142). UNESCO was in these years participating in a “vibrant movement of protest, a thriving international resistance to the cultural and economic values of the liberal capitalist developed world” (140). Its attempts to formulate new policies were based in a view, widely held outside the United States and Europe, that “white universalism and developmentalism were neocolonial impositions that prevented the postcolonial nations from achieving fair integration into the global capitalist markets” (140). As already indicated, part of the reason this policy initiative failed is that it was outgunned by the media companies, who owned not just the “cultural storehouse” of global IP but the communications system (the “media”) itself. Anticolonial voices within UNESCO could shape policy declarations calling for aggressive reform of the world's mass media, but as Brouillette details, these were drowned out by the industry-amplified counter-rhetoric of actors from the most powerful states. What ultimately emerged from the unequal policy debates were little more than vague endorsements of unspecified voluntary measures that might magically boost the cultural independence of developing nations. Even such flaccid declarations were subject to further dilutive mediations upon public release.But how much possibility did this moment really hold? Even if the gross inequities of media power had somehow been overcome and UNESCO's most radical reforms put into practice, it is not clear, from Brouillette's account, that struggling postcolonial nations would have greatly benefited. Presumably the New Order would have opened new literary entrepreneurial opportunities in some poor countries, promoting growth of domestic publishing industries and assuring that more of the profit from literary transactions landed in domestic coffers. These were important goals for UNESCO even before the organization shifted to cheerleading for the creative economy. Through its formidable research programs, it came to understand the imbalances of the book trade better than anyone. The research it conducted from the 1950s onward amounted, as Brouillette quite brilliantly describes, to an alternative path for book history in which the “perfected system of free exchange” implied by the Darntonian model can be seen rather as a hegemonic structure of protections and exclusions: “less a circuit than a fortress” (81). By the 1970s a majority of UNESCO's members were committed to storming this fortress, liberating the book trade in their developing home countries. But as an agency of cultural policy making, UNESCO's more fundamental aims were in fact cultural. Literary publishing on a small-national scale might not even produce much in the way of profit. In most cases UNESCO was envisioning pretty substantial forms of state sponsorship. A viable domestic publishing industry was desirable because it would foster a viable domestic literary culture. Ultimately, what UNESCO sought in this most politically engaged phase of policy debate were not wider business opportunities but wider opportunities to cultivate a literary disposition, an affective investment in higher values than those comprehended by the business of development.For all their clarity of vision regarding the inequities of the world system, cultural policy makers at UNESCO still believed in literature as a special and higher realm, a repository of the ineffable. Brouillette is sympathetic to their utopian longings but skeptical toward their “idealizations of literature as a potent site of noncommercial humanistic formation” (7). Like Etienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey, she sees the literary as a “bourgeois sociolect” that serves mainly as a basis of social distinction (5). This sociolect expresses itself, and shores up the elite solidarities of the reading class, whenever calls are issued to “genuflect before ‘the work itself’ or ‘the aesthetic’” (6)—and no less so when the work in question is held to exemplify some form of authentic indigeneity. Brouillette is contemptuous of the idea that literature operates on a separate, higher plane than that of social advantage and uneven development, that it enjoys some special independence from “the realities of production” (4). Her readings here of works from the canon of world literature emphasize how firmly they are grounded in the primary relations of global production, the “real economy” of the capitalist world system that is also the basis for every endeavor of literary policy making (2). This way of reading has supposedly lost steam since Bruno Latour began poking holes in the guiding assumptions of critical sociology. But Brouillette, who brings to the project of blunt critique the sharp tools of book history and policy studies, shows that it is possible to invoke large-scale motors of cultural production such as the social, the economy, the world system (what Latour mocks as “gigantic forces” and “dark powers” that “explain everything” [Latour 22, 102]) without accelerating past the many concrete linkages and associations that define a work's actual agency in the world. Indeed, in the way it deftly articulates cultural particulars with world structures through the mid-level mediations of policy making, her book contributes importantly to recent debates on method.The upshot of her readings is that literature's role is a constrained and quietist one. For each of the three phases of UNESCO's history, Brouillette pauses to consider one or two literary works that can shed light on the cultural and economic circumstances of that period. For the middle phase, her key exhibit is the Sudanese author Tayeb Salih's 1962 short story “The Doum Tree of Wad Hamid.” This famous story concerns a remote village that becomes embroiled in the politics of postindependence nation making when state administrators propose to remove a giant doum tree growing by an old tomb on the riverbank to install a modern water pump and establish the site as a station stop for steamers. The ancient tree is a central, sacred element of the villagers' culture, held by them to possess powerful healing properties. To protect it, they throw the government's men into the river, an act of collective resistance that leads to arrests and jailings. A rival national political faction then seizes on the villagers' cause, making their plight a symbol of the ruling party's disrespect for the culture and traditions of ordinary Sudanese people. This national identity has no meaning whatsoever for the villagers. But by showcasing its own supposed reverence for the tree and outrage at the government's attempt to “desecrate that pure and holy place,” the rival faction succeeds in taking power—whereupon it places a protective fence around the tree with a historical plaque honoring its new importance as, precisely, a national symbol representing the dignity of the Sudanese common folk. The fence and official interpretive plaque, says the old man who recounts the events, are the first new things in the village since God planted the tree itself. Other new things will follow, of course: the story, as Brouillette says, is a perfect parable of “developmental teleology” (113).Reading the story in relation to cultural policy and governance, Brouillette focuses her particular attention on the framing of the old man's narrative by the young man to whom he tells it. The young man expects the old man to be upset by this forced conscription into modernity of the village's most sacred object. But the old man remains placid. The tree is still for him the same tree, whatever it may be for others. As for the further impositions of modernity, the old man considers that “there's plenty of room for all these things: the doum tree, the tomb, the water-pump, and the steamer's stopping-place” (Brouillette 73). In this way, says Brouillette, the story “captures perfectly UNESCO's own desire to negotiate localism and globalism, tradition and modernity, blueprint development and its fragmentation into humane, sensitized, culturalized forms—that is, into ‘cultural development’” (74). Like UNESCO's policy declarations, Salih's story offers “a fantasy, perhaps a compensatory one” for believers in the mitigative value of culture (74).Just as important, the story helps to fold that fantasy into a suitable structure of feeling. As he processes the old man's accommodative stance toward development, the young man finds himself unsettled by “a feeling of sadness, sadness for some obscure thing which I was unable to define” (74). This residual sadness, says Brouillette, is the affective core of the work. Yes, Salih's story allows us to participate in the fantasy of a developmental regime so humane, so respectful of cultural tradition, that it can leave “plenty of room” for the things that are most truly precious. But the story tempers that happy dream of heritage preserved with the sadness of a real if incalculable loss. The literary work thus serves hand-in-hand with the work of literary policy making to perform a major task of governance: instilling what Brouillette terms “the correct affective disposition” toward structures of oppression and exclusion (142). The reader, Brouillette says, is brought into accordance with the young man, disposed in the end “not to celebrate, but to acknowledge, with sadness, the perils of incorporation into the modern world system. . . . Not to celebrate, but neither to fight fundamentally against” (75).Even in the most “vibrant moment of protest,” it was the fate of UNESCO and of the world literature it championed to sooth and pacify and thus, as Brouillette bluntly puts it, to “provide a more successful environment for commerce” (17). That is a harsh judgment but, as developed in this book, a compelling one. It should be taken to heart not just by the makers of literary policy but, as Brouillette intends, by the many scholars in literary studies who still insist on literature's inherently “propitious politics and salvific social role” (7).