ariel: A Review of International English Literature

The emergence of world literature as a crucial academic discourse in recent decades has transformed scholarly discussions in postcolonial literary studies and comparative literature. It has substantially impacted the study of various (typically European) national literatures in the Euro-American academy and has thus led to lively discussions about how the category should be conceptualized. For some scholars, world literature is a canon of texts that travel beyond their places of origin (Damrosch); others argue that it gestures toward a “World Republic of Letters” (Casanova); and yet others understand it as the literary registration of the one and unequal capitalist world-system (Warwick Research Collective). Scholars also debate how world literature transforms extant protocols of reading. Franco Moretti, for instance, suggests that world literature requires a move away from close to “distant” reading—that is, more computational approaches to textual exegesis—while Emily Apter calls for reexamining the politics of translation. This churning of the intellectual ocean has made non-Western literary traditions a little more visible in the Euro-American academy.

Aamir Mufti’s Forget English!: Orientalisms and World Literatures is a timely and important intervention in this discursive arena. An ambitious book that [End Page 170] is expansive in scope, it re-conceptualizes the category of world literature and interrogates the accepted genealogy of the term. While popular conceptions of world literature suggest a kind of liberal one-world-ness that transcends all boundaries, Mufti argues that the category functions in quite the opposite manner—as a kind of “border regime” that polices the im/mobility of these texts (9). Complicit in this process is English—the global literary vernacular—which serves as world literature’s condition of possibility while also mystifying its own structuring role in the process. And English’s role as the vanishing mediator provides the book with its titular conceit: “forget English” is both an imperative as well as a comment on the present historical conjuncture that enables world literature to be.

Moving away from normative accounts of world literature as emerging from Goethe’s comment on weltliteratur, Mufti suggests instead that the category originates in colonial power structures and the project of Orientalism, which he understands succinctly as the “cultural logic of colonial rule” (22). Mufti develops this argument with nuance and intellectual dexterity over the book’s chapters. The first chapter contends that world literature “pays scant attention to the very historical process that is its condition of possibility,” namely “the assimilation of vastly dispersed and heterogenous writing practices and traditions into the space of ‘literature’” (57). To support this claim, Mufti provides a powerful critique of Pascale Casanova’s delineation of the emergence of the global literary field in her World Republic of Letters. Casanova, building on the work of Benedict Anderson, outlines this process along three key axes: the appearance of vernaculars in Europe; the “philological-lexicographical revolution” that shaped the development of various national cultures; and eventually, the expansion of this literary space worldwide in the mid-twentieth century owing to decolonization (57). However, Mufti contends, this outline is misconceived because non-Western literary traditions were visible in Europe much earlier—since the “discovery” of Eastern classical languages. The constitution of the literary field was not, as Casanova proposes, a European phenomenon but a planetary one, which eventually brought into being an international literary space as well as the category of world literature. Mufti’s intervention illuminates, once again, the centrality of the “other”—the Orient—in Europe’s self-definition, thus providing a crucial corrective to the unthinking Eurocentrism that permeates even some of the best conjectures on world literature.

The next section of the first chapter engages with the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to take up the imbricated roles of colonialism, capitalism, and the world market in constituting world literature. Mufti reads Marx’s writings on India to demonstrate a tension between Anglicist and Orientalist [End Page 171] positions, suggesting that Marx anticipates issues that would subsequently be central to post...