World literature and commodity Frontiers

This introduction to a special issue on world literature and commodity frontiers elaborates on the methodological premise of the issue. The essays collected here all pursue a form of comparativism grounded in the life- and environment-making dynamics of commodity frontiers. Commodity frontiers are spaces of extraction or production that reorganize land and labour in such a way as to send vast reservoirs of food, energy, raw materials, and labour-power into the world-economy. Exploring how literature responds to frontier-led transformations in human and nonhuman natures allows for the comparison of texts across both space and time. The essays in this volume cover literary works from the late nineteenth century to the present. Focusing on frontier zones from South Wales to southern Africa, Canada to the Caribbean, Dorset to Oceania, they explore the political ecologies and cultural valences of a broad range of extractive, agro-industrial, and technological operations, including sugar monoculture, copra cash-cropping, oil extraction, coal mining, water extractivism, stone quarrying, the opium trade, and the contemporary data frontier. Not only do the essays analyse socioecological conflicts in, and cultural responses to, peripheralized sites of primary commodity production. They also demonstrate where the logics of the commodity frontier are replicated and applied outside of the ecological sphere and place the concept within a wider network of relations including social reproduction and immaterial labour.