Insurgent Imaginations: World Literature and the Periphery

As efforts to make the field of world literature more inclusive gather pace, Auritro Majumder’s Insurgent Imaginations proposes to properly theorize the notion of world literature from the ground up. In contrast to literary models popularized by Pascale Casanova and David Damrosch, among others, Majumder claims a peripheral provenance for world literature. That is, where these popular accounts have articulated literary histories radiating outward from Europe, Majumder traces the origins of world literature to the explosive trenches of anticolonialism. The resulting account is full of improbable, rebellious twists.Consider Majumder’s model theorists of world literature: the Bengali humanist Rabindranath Tagore, who was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize, and the communist revolutionary Mao Zedong, who founded the People’s Republic of China. This unlikely mix of Asian anticolonialism—punctuated in the opening chapter by Tagore’s lecture on Visva-Sahitya (1907) and Mao’s Talks on the Yan’an Forum (1942)—sets the tone for Majumder’s theorization of “peripheral aesthetics.” Where literary critics, including Marxists, in the North Atlantic academy have long regarded the novel to be the paradigmatic literary form of modernity, Majumder tries to foreground other minor genres, scarcely “literary” in their formation, and certainly not produced by litterateurs. The second chapter is devoted to the memoirs of M. N. Roy, the globetrotting fugitive who founded the communist parties of Mexico and India, famously debated Lenin on the “national question,” and was purged from the Comintern and the Communist Party of India. Similarly, where the field of world literature has been recently run over by the competing textual models of close and distant reading, Majumder turns our attention to questions of literacy in peripheral societies and the consequent importance of extratextual—visual and oral—genres in such places. Enter, on cue, the Bengali auteur Mrinal Sen, whose films were a mainstay of the Afro-Asian and European circuits, and the Bengali actor-playwright, Utpal Dutt, whose work combined the Brechtian Lehrstück with the indigenous dramatic form of jatra.In those rare cases, when peripheral figures have been integrated into Anglo-American canons and syllabi—Arundhati Roy and Mahasweta Devi (thanks to Gayatri Spivak’s translations)—Majumder astutely ledgers the cost of this international acclaim. The fourth chapter reveals how the transnational circulation of Roy and Devi’s works has erased those revolutionary networks of print and folk cultures that had impelled their emergence in the first place. Finally, what of the present moment, the age of globalized capital that has impelled the widely debated overthrow of postcolonial studies by world literature? In other words, what of the afterlife of these crisscrossing anticolonial formations, alternately co-opted or defeated outright? In the book’s final chapter, the tragedy of political resistance turns into a farce of literary recognition. For Majumder, the clearest symptom of this transformation is to be found in The White Tiger, whose Booker Prize-winning parody of internationalism exemplifies “the sweet triumph of the market.”Although Insurgent Imaginations focuses on Indian, primarily Bengali literature, Majumder skillfully unveils a vast map of “peripheral internationalism” by making connections between the disparate literary and critical genres of memoirs, theater, film, novels, political economy, and literary theory. For instance, Tagore and Mao might seem like an unlikely pair, but Majumder meticulously reconstructs the grounds for this comparison: tracking Tagore’s visit to China in 1924; the reception of his homespun humanism in both China and the Soviet Union; the tensions between critiques of Tagore by Georg Lukács in the German magazine Die Rote Fahne and local Bengali Marxists in the small magazines Kallol, Agroni, and Marxbadi; the Bengali reception of Mao’s poetic and political works starting in 1948, which simultaneously sparked a Maoist reappraisal of Tagore’s corpus in Parichay, Notun Sahitya, Daak; and finally, the Chinese travelogues of Bengali leftists Hemanga Biswas and Utpal Dutt. Similarly, in the second chapter, the form of Roy’s memoir prompts a fluent comparison with the Latin American genre of testimonio; Roy’s transnational travels offer glimpses into his encounters with the likes of Antonio Gramsci, Clara Zetkin, and Claude McKay; and his attempts to reconstruct Marxism in colonial India find parallel in the works of the Peruvian writer, José Carlos Mariátegui. The individual chapters, too, flow seamlessly into each other. For instance, the textual form of Roy’s memoirs and his theorization of the colonial agricultural proletariat slowly transmute into their dialectical others: the extratextual form of Mrinal Sen’s cinema and its depiction of the postcolonial urban lumpenproletariat. The fourth chapter is exemplary in questioning the popular shibboleths of the Anglophone postcolonial theory. Where critics have often framed Devi’s work in terms of difference and hybridity, Majumder diligently recovers the genealogies of revolutionary culture that have been frequently ignored, if not suppressed altogether. The influence of Devi’s contemporaries on her work is a case in point: Utpal Dutt’s jatras about Vietnam and Black Power, Saurin Sen’s serialized novels about Congo and Bolivia, as well as Devi’s own engagements with Lu Xun and Akhtaruzzaman Elias. Simultaneously, this demotic triangle of Mai Lai in Vietnam, Detroit in the United States, and Naxalbari in India offers a radical counterpoint to recent scholarly fascination with social-scientific models in “world literature.”But just like Majumder’s protagonists, who are locked in a “processive struggle” (2) for reimagining “universal history” (103), his own study is also caught in the drift of a similar dynamic (Majumder’s preferred concept for this struggle is “agon” [2], drawn from Timothy Brennan’s reading of Vico). On the one hand, he strives to offer us granular close readings of individual texts, cautiously peeling layers of historical determination. On the other hand, the pressure to totalize also cramps his style. There are moments in the book when one wishes for deeper engagement with the historical specificity of colonial and capitalist domination in particular societies. The challenge of balancing the particular and the universal also bears upon the form of the book in notable ways, occasionally resulting in hectic surveys. Consider how, within a span of five pages in the first chapter, one encounters successive engagements with the manifestoes of William Wordsworth, Virginia Woolf, and Gabriel Rocha. In its most concentrated form, this totalizing drive is telegraphed in the form of long lists—exhilarating certainly, but also unsettling, not least because these peripheral figures are not well-known in the North Atlantic academy. Consider these two examples: “Latin American dependista economists such as Raúl Prebisch, Theotônio Dos Santos, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and others” and “feminist authors . . . such as . . . Ama Ata Aidoo, Maryse Condé, Assia Djebar, Micere Githae Mugo, Marie Vieux-Chauvet, and Excilia Saldaña.”Majumder’s lists are best read as a canny negation of the curatorial drive of world literature, a playful provincialization of its latest glossy catalog, where literatures from the Global South are only grist to the mill of globalization. But since Majumder does not always discuss these figures in detail, these lists also read like speculative prolegomena of sorts. They seem to gesture toward other possible renderings of internationalism, with different, even revolving casts of protagonists. In this case, the form of Insurgent Imaginations seems to be in closer sync with its content. Even as Majumder returns us to the high noon of “peripheral internationalism,” he frequently reminds us that the sun of anticolonialism has not completely set—this “processive struggle” (2) remains incomplete, and its living legacy remains open for future reassessments and revisions. Perhaps, taking Majumder’s lead, the new histories of world literature will be written from vantages that are even more peripheral. And perhaps, they will unveil speculative maps that are even more totalizing. At stake are the marginal lives of those litterateurs, political organizers, editors, theorists, and publishers, whose experimental visions of revolution and internationalism have rarely seen the light of the Anglophone world. The likes of Saurin Sen, serializing a revolutionary novel set in Argentina in the pages of a small Bengali magazine, or Bhabani Sen, reviewing Gramsci in Parichay, years—no decades—before Gramsci would be institutionalized by postcolonial scholars in Anglo-American universities. Insurgent Imaginations is an important contribution to the field of world literature and deserves to be widely read.