NEW COMPARISONS IN WORLD LITERATURE World Literature, Non-Synchronism, and the Politics of Time Filippo Menozzi New Comparisons in World Literature Series Editors Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee Department of English Comparative Literary Studies University of Warwick Coventry, UK Neil Lazarus University of Warwick Coventry, UK New Comparisons in World Literature offers a fresh perspective on one ofthemostexcitingcurrentdebatesinhumanitiesbyapproaching‘world literature’ not in terms of particular kinds of reading but as a particular kind of writing.We take ‘worldliterature’to bethat body of writingthat registers in various ways, at the levels of form and content, the histor- ical experience of capitalist modernity. We aim to publish works that take up the challenge of understanding how literature registers both the global extension of ‘modern’ social forms and relations and the peculiar new modes of existence and experience that are engendered as a result. Our particular interest lies in studies that analyse the registration of this decisive historical process in literary consciousness and affect. Editorial Board Dr. Nicholas Brown, University of Illinois, USA Dr. Bo G. Ekelund, University of Stockholm, Sweden Dr. Dorota Kolodziejczyk, Wroclaw University, Poland Professor Paulo de Medeiros, University of Warwick, UK Dr. Robert Spencer, University of Manchester, UK Professor Imre Szeman, University of Alberta, Canada Professor Peter Hitchcock, Baruch College, USA Dr. Ericka Beckman, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA Dr. Sarah Brouillette, Carleton University, Canada Professor Supriya Chaudhury, Jadavpur University, India Professor Stephen Shapiro, University of Warwick, UK More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15067 Filippo Menozzi World Literature, Non-Synchronism, and the Politics of Time Filippo Menozzi Liverpool John Moores University Liverpool, Merseyside, UK New Comparisons in World Literature ISBN 978-3-030-41697-3 ISBN 978-3-030-41698-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41698-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,electronicadaptation,computersoftware,orbysimilarordissimilarmethodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such namesareexemptfromtherelevantprotectivelawsandregulationsandthereforefreefor general use. Thepublisher,theauthorsandtheeditorsaresafetoassumethattheadviceandinforma- tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respecttothematerialcontainedhereinorforanyerrorsoromissionsthatmayhavebeen made.Thepublisherremainsneutralwithregardtojurisdictionalclaimsinpublishedmaps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: © Gina Pricope/Getty Image, Image ID: 636246536 This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Acknowledgments I would like to express my gratitude to the series editors, Neil Lazarus and Pablo Mukherjee, for their support and for always being an inspiring guide. Many thanks to colleagues who have supported me with their generosity,friendshipandencouragementduringthepastfewyears:Alice Ferrebe, James Whitehead, Jo Croft, Glenda Norquay, Kathryn Walch- ester,JonathanCranfield,MichaelMorris,RossDawson,PatriciaMurray, Colin Harrison, Rebecca Bailey, Deaglan O’Donghaile, Jude Piesse, Jo Price, Gerry Smyth, Bella Adams, Joe Moran, Elspeth Graham, Anna Maria Cimitile, Miguel Mellino, Guido Rings, Deepika Bahri, Stephen Morton, Lisa Lau, Chantal Zabus, Pina Piccolo, Nilufer Bharucha, KatharineCox,DanielleChavrimootoo,ChiaraZuanni,MichaelBirchall, Lee Wright, Alex Miles, Helen Rogers, Emily Cuming, Steven Spittle, NedimHassan,NickianneMoody,DavidTyrerandJoeSim.Mystudents atLiverpoolJohnMooresUniversity,especiallyChristinnaHobbsandmy postcolonialwritingandworldliteratureclasses.VickyBates,TomasRené andRebeccaHinsleyatPalgravefortheirworkandhelp.Theanonymous peer-reviewersfortheirthoughtfulfeedbackandtheproductionteam.On apersonalnote,Iwouldliketosaythankyouto:iMilanesiinCambridge (Fra and Irving), Yata and Yuriko, Yama and Mami, Vale, Ale and Oscar, Ricky and Manu, Donata and Antonio, Raffo, Simona and Adele, and my family (Luigi, Elena, Gregorio, Francesca, Chiara, Angelo, Carolina, Camillo, Vinicio and Pizzi). Dedicato a Roberta e ad Alessandro. v Contents 1 Introduction: World Literature Beyond Synchronism 1 2 Dislocating Time: Nampally Road and the Politics of Non-synchronism 47 3 TheAuthorasDigger:TheGypsyGoddess andtheStrata of History 75 4 Beyond Diaspora and Nostalgia: M.G. Vassanji’s Asynchronous Images 103 5 Written Out of History: The Agbekoya Rebellion at Temporal Crossroads 133 6 Time,ExtinctionandAccumulation:ReadingHenrietta Rose-Innes’s Green Lion 161 7 Conclusion: On Skipping History 191 Index 209 vii About the Author Filippo Menozzi (Ph.D., Kent) is lecturer in postcolonial and world literature at Liverpool John Moores University. He is the author of Post- colonial Custodianship: Cultural and Literary Inheritance (Routledge, 2014) and guest editor of a special issue of New Formations on Rosa Luxemburg and the postcolonial condition. His work has appeared in journals such as College Literature, The Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Interventions, ARIEL and Wasafiri. He is section editor of the online journal Postcolonial Text and Exchange Associate at Tate Liverpool. With Deepika Bahri, he is co-editor of Teaching South Asian Women’s Writing for the Publications of the Modern Language Association. In 2019, he was awardedan LJMU Vice-Chancellor’s Medal and IndividualTeaching Excellence Award. ix CHAPTER 1 Introduction: World Literature Beyond Synchronism The introduction situates the concept of non-synchronism in current debates in world literary studies. Drawing on the Warwick Research Collective’s concept of world literature, non-synchronism is presented as a dialectical and materialist way of thinking the temporality of literary expression from peripheral formations of the capitalist world economy. In its aesthetic and social aspects, the temporal dimension analysed in the introduction is affiliated to discourses on a singular modernity, the questions of totality and of peripheral modernism, the antinomies of Ernst Bloch’s philosophy, and debates on culture and politics at the heartofliterarycriticismafterpostcolonialism.Non-synchronismopposes both teleological views of history and the relativism of ideologies of multiple modernities, illustrating how heterogeneous temporalities need to be located within the systemic frame of reference imposed by the accumulation of capital. 1 The Antinomies of World Literature In a recent book titled The Ministry of Nostalgia, writer and journalist Owen Hatherley sketches telling reflections on the resurgence of a wave of nostalgia in contemporary Britain. He observes that the insecurities of the current historical moment have provoked a widespread yearning for the times of post-war Austerity, a “nostalgia for the state of being © The Author(s) 2020 1 F. Menozzi, World Literature, Non-Synchronism, and the Politics of Time, New Comparisons in World Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41698-0_1 2 F. MENOZZI repressed – solid, stoic, public spirited, as opposed to the depoliticised, hysterical and privatised reality of Britain over the last thirty years” (21). Thisnostalgicfeeling,Hatherleycontinues,atthesametime“asitevokes a sense of loss over the decline of an idea of Britain and the British, it is both reassuring and flattering, implying a virtuous (if highly self-aware) consumer stoicism” (ibid.). Contemporary nostalgia surfaces in the recy- clingofsymbolsandmaximsoftimespastaspoliticalweaponstoaddress the crisis and impoverishment determined by the rise of the neoliberal economy. Nostalgia feeds on a perception of the present as hopeless, unstable, insecure and puzzling; it nurtures the longing for stable, clear and solid old times. It hence implies a fascination with the past—often an idealised, mythical, never-really-experienced past—as a symptom of discontent in the present, and it is not limited to Britain. In countries as distant and different as India, the USA, Italy and Egypt, for example, the political stage is increasingly dominated by emergent political forces built on explicitly nostalgic agendas, such as “taking back” national borders and the purity of national communities, the ideal of making nations great “again,” the rise of fundamentalist rhetorics, localisms, neo-fascism andreligiousorthodoxies,accompaniedbyenduringstatesofemergency. These trends seem to reveal a quite depressing historical conjuncture in which, as philosopher Slavoj Zizek puts it, people had better reject any uplifting narrative and embrace instead the “courage of hopeless- ness.” Many political movements, today, seem to express hopelessness througharetrospectivegazesummoningthepast,ratherthanthefuture, as blueprint for imagining the present. Thus, anti-immigrant rhetoric in Britain after the Brexit vote, for example, envisions life outside the EuropeanUnionbyturningtoaconceptofthenationaswhiteandmyth- ical imagined community pre-existing Britain’s joining of the European Union in 1973, but also by threatening the legal status of the so-called Windrush generation which settled in Britain from the Caribbean in the 1940s and 1950s. The act of looking back towards the past in order to respondtoanuncertainpresentisnot,ofcourse,anewthingexclusiveto the regressive and conservative populism of twenty-first-century Europe. The return of the past as form of political mobilisation is a very peculiar fact, though, which cannot be explained away by recourse to developmental or teleological concepts of history, whereby these revenants would necessarily be overcome once the entire planet has been rationalised and disenchanted. The re-enchantment of the world seems to occur, today, in non-Western societies as among the wealthiest,