Shifting Optics on the World
DOUGLAS NORTHROP
“Give me a place to stand,” Archimedes reportedly said while contemplating a lever in the third century BCE, “and I will move the world.” The quotation may be dubious: the remark first appears in manuscripts written hundreds of years after Archimedes had died, and it has been translated in different ways from the Greek. But the words lived on, and have spread far beyond Archimedes’ own fields of interest, mathematics and engineering. The phrase has been invoked, and its underlying idea applied metaphorically, by such varied figures as Plutarch, René Descartes, Joseph Conrad, Leon Trotsky, and Al Gore. To historians such a long pathway might suggest, first, the complexities of tracing utterances through space and time, finding a tapestry of shifting meanings and resonances along the way – moving beyond questions of simple fact (“Did Archimedes really say that?”) to particular contexts and social practices (“Why did Trotsky use a lever to describe the Bolshevik Revolution?”). Yet Archimedes’ attributed words still do conceptual work for scholars, suggesting the importance of choosing one’s starting point with care. Put simply, much depends on where a writer stands, and how she or he begins to work. A starting point frames whatever follows: it shapes where readers of a history book, for example, will be taken in space or time; what they will be shown as legitimate and persuasive evidence; and what an author’s guiding principles, concepts, and questions will be.
The present volume closes by asking readers to consider explicitly where they should begin – in conceiving new directions for teaching and scholarship. It does so by reaching outside the discipline of History. Complementing the foregoing essays on world and global history as seen from outside the institutional settings of Anglophone academia, how else might globally inclined historians think differently about their subject? How else could one conceive a “world”? How could we benefit from knowing about other forms of globally oriented work, and how might it infuse historical thinking about the human past? Scholars are wrestling with the global in other disciplinary terrains – all the more as “disciplines” bleed into one another, with neither space nor time the sole province of historians (not by a long way). Many other academic fields face similar issues: responding to globalization – a universally recognized, but contradictorily defined, phenomenon; displacing the nation-state as a presumptively fundamental category for scholarly analysis; evaluating the trade-offs of big-picture analysis, with its macro-scaled perspectives, against the risks of metanarratives; overcoming the cultural parochialism of longstanding disciplinary and institutional practices; and dealing with problems of inclusivity at multiple scales of inquiry. What optics have other intellectual terrains produced to see the world? What other starting points exist, and how might they enrich the global dimensions of historical teaching and scholarship?
Practitioners of world and global history have prided themselves on having an expansive view, an insistent openness to breaking through the predefined categories that structure disciplinary history. This includes perspectives generated at greater scales of space and time, and emphasizes approaches that cut across national, state, and regional boundaries. But it simultaneously includes a willingness to use new forms of evidence, and new ways of pursuing historical knowledge. World historians show an almost gleeful inclination to cross the borders of academic discipline as well as geographic space and temporal period. Such studious indiscipline may explain some of the skittishness among other (“traditional”) historians, especially when disciplinary borrowings draw on positivistic methods and the natural sciences (e.g., attempts to apply evolutionary biological notions such as “natural selection” to human history). Fred Spier’s chapter on Big History discusses these natural-science approaches, so I will not address them at greater length here.1 For reasons of space I restrict myself to the social sciences and humanities, surveying recent work from five such approaches – five “other globes.”
The sketches offered here illumine disciplines ranging from the self-consciously “hard” (defined by practitioners as “scientific,” that is, positivist, experimental, and/or quantitative) to “soft” (empirically based, but using “fuzzier” qualitative methods, relativistically framed or contextually oriented). Each has the potential to cross-fertilize writing in world and global history. Readers will conclude which approaches are the most germane or promising – and I hope they will also go on to explore other domains of globally inflected work (film studies, dance, philosophy, public health, international security, information sciences, or chaos theory, to name a few).2
The five areas chosen have clear, almost self-evident, connections to the core concerns of world and global history, but are also places where the scholarly literatures have not yet been fully interwoven.3 Trade relationships, first, are a central, ongoing focus of world historians (see chapters above by Levi and by Fernández-Armesto); they produce copious sources (documents from merchants, trading companies, tax registers, etc.), and offer a straightforward way for historians to theorize exchanges and encounters among peoples from different parts of the world. The first sketch thus briefly asks how economists, a group ranging from abstract theorists to applied business economists, address issues of trade at interregional-to-global scales. Second, politics – in a broad sense, incorporating social and institutional power relations within, between, and prior to the entities we call “states” – likewise plays a key role for scholars of world history (see chapters by Morillo and by Sinha). How do political scientists, especially those writing about comparative politics and international relations, see a globe of political interactions? Can they shed light on state-based social hierarchies, military mobilizations, or interregional empires? Third, anthropologists – like historians – set out to study cultural practice and social relationships around the world (see chapters by Vélez, Prange, and Clossey, by Burton, and by Ward), while being generally more self-aware: much ethnographic writing shows how an author’s presuppositions, choices, and mere presence can have a dramatic effect on the subject being investigated. Much anthropological work has focused on contextual, self-reflective “thick descriptions” written at relatively small scales. Recently, however, cultural and linguistic anthropologists have developed new forms of more geographically stretched “global ethnography.” Fourth, scholars conventionally use the moment in time that written texts appeared as a way to divide “history” (practiced by historians) from “prehistory” (the turf of archaeologists and biological anthropologists) (see chapters by Yoffee and by Liu). But documents – with written words – do not only belong to historians. What happens to texts, whether ancient or modern, when they cross borders and move into new places, and are translated into new languages? How can specialists in comparative literature help us to understand global approaches to writing, reading, and publishing? Fifth, what about the visual (see chapter by Witz)? What happens when images, or other intentionally created objects, move through space and time – when motifs and techniques cross borders to influence artists in faraway places, artwork finds buyers on the other side of the world, and collections of supposedly emblematic objects are displayed in “global” museums? How do art historians think about nontextual materials, whether representational or abstract in form? Is it possible to discuss aesthetic questions at supranational or global scale?
A few caveats to begin. The authors I cite occupy a broad variety of methodological approaches and political positions, but obviously hardly begin to cover the full range of any single discipline, let alone to encompass the humanities and social sciences. In using them as exemplars of their “globes,” I mean only to suggest some of the approaches that can be taken by using the tools of each discipline. Each of these domains obviously develops, and is constrained by, its own theoretical and analytical tools. Every author has already navigated a professional trajectory of intellectual, institutional, and interpersonal interactions, and it can be hazardous to abstract their work from these contexts. Doing so risks losing its embeddedness within theoretical and methodological vocabularies, ignores its institutional locations, and elides the interactive, iterative character of scholarly debate. (Do globally inclined specialists in other fields, for example, occupy marginal positions, or have as fraught a relationship with gatekeepers of disciplinary standing, as world historians perceive themselves to do? Sometimes yes, sometimes no.)
This point suggests the need for richly contextual disciplinary reading: a need that I can voice but not adequately observe. Without such contextual understandings, though, one faces the danger of cherry-picking ideas at an abstract or metaphorical level (such as Archimedes’ lever) that are qualified and circumscribed in their original domains. Hence the sketches offered here should not be taken as definitive, but rather as suggesting areas for further reading. Take the headings as a roadmap, encouragement to pursue further investigation. Historians should not simply invoke these ideas – or rely on their halos of theoretical authority – without delving more deeply into the frameworks that produce and sustain them. Big Historians using notions of “complexity,” for instance, need serious training in the mathematics of dynamical systems (“chaos theory”) and the physics of entropy. Without it, a reader might fairly ask, how can they evaluate the use of concepts drawn from cosmic (or subatomic) spaces, or judge whether such notions are applicable to human society? How far can such scales speak to one another if they are studied by separate disciplines – each with its own understandings of evidence, institutional structures of authority, modes of argumentation, and conventions of proof?
Global Economics: International Trade and Business
Thomas Carlyle first dubbed economics “the dismal science” in 1849, and wags have quoted him ever since. Economists long since tired of the quotation, but still welcome part of the characterization: the idea that economics is a science. They see themselves as social scientists, investigating general “laws” of economic behavior – seeing people, all people, as unknowing actors in what amounts to a vast experiment. Many economists, although believing “economics” a universal human phenomenon, study it through the norms and practices of modern industrial capitalism – using a mix of experimental work, mathematical modeling, and quantitative analysis. Their methods include large-n studies, based on mathematical evaluation of aggregated data from thousands, even millions or billions, of transactions. At the other extreme of disciplinary economics one finds methods drawn from behavioral psychology: small-group experiments that undercut ideas of humans as rational-choice actors (in which consumers, investors, or business executives are seen as consistently motivated by self-interest and profit). Non- and precapitalist forms of economy are largely absent from either approach to economic research – as is economic history, especially of the deeper (preindustrial) human past, meaning the millennia before 1750 CE.4 Economists and business professors aim instead to produce work of immediate, practical relevance to policymakers, businesses, and investors today; their disciplinary success rises if they can demonstrate a predictive ability. Does a particular analysis, in other words, accurately predict swings in stock-market prices, unemployment rates, or trade-account balances?
Historians do not set out to predict the future, nor do they generally talk about their subjects as part of a vast (nonrepeatable) experiment. World historians, however, are often more willing than others to think about “relevance,” and do not always shy away from present-day questions and concerns. And here, surely, the data-focused approach of business economists could undergird a particular approach to, and perspective on, the globe. As one example, consider World 3.0, a recent book by Pankaj Ghemawat, a business economist now working in Spain. In it Ghemawat reaches an unusual set of conclusions, the details of which are by no means accepted by all economists; but his work – published in 2011 by the Harvard Business Review Press – usefully shows economic methods applied at global scale.
Ghemawat sets out ambitiously to investigate the actual meaning of “globalization” in today’s world. To do so he adopts the perspective of industrial organization economics, which studies market failures and regulation, and also uses the empirical methods of international economics to evaluate how difference, and distance, affect trade. His analysis proceeds from the point of view of concrete actors – individual firms – not vague trends or abstract entities like “markets.” At every step he asks how business professionals evaluate potential gains or losses from trading with partners across borders. World 3.0 sets this analysis in the context of a (very) brief overview of human history, covering most of the human story in a half-dozen pages. Careful nuance on the deep past (labeled “World 1.0” and “World 2.0”) is clearly not the goal, so Ghemawat moves quickly to his main point: testing the widespread assertion made by authors (such as Thomas Friedman, in The World is Flat, 2005) and policymakers (in speeches at meetings of the G5, G8, G20 countries, and so on) that we live in an unprecedentedly “global” world. Pundits and politicians alike say that today’s world is far more interconnected than ever before, with economic relationships playing a key role to pull people from far-flung places together in freshly interdependent ways (whether they wish it or not). This discourse of unprecedented and omnipresent global exchange and dependence, in Ghemawat’s contrarian view, is vastly overblown – more rhetoric than reality – and he calls it “globaloney.”
Ghemawat argues that we live in a world that is as (at most) “semi-globalized.” He even quantifies this assertion, concluding that depending on how one looks, today’s world is only between 10 and 25 percent “globalized.” He hopes this figure will grow: like many economists, he wants to encourage more and fuller market integration across ever larger areas. Disciplinary economics, in his view, proves that integration inevitably brings about an overall increase in prosperity (2011: 22). Nevertheless Ghemawat does not support unleashing the power of a completely free market at global scale. Instead he says that long-term global integration will require more market regulation, not less, and much of it is bound to happen at the level of national states. Nation-states remain more central to people’s lives than “globalthink” suggests, for the ostensibly universal human reason that “trust and sympathy decline dramatically with difference” (2011: x). He offers a general rule of thumb that applies this principle everywhere: a 1 percent increase in distance between two potential partners produces a 1 percent reduction in trade between them (2011: 57). Ghemawat sees this rule as persisting throughout human history, and he finds it in today’s world through empirical tests – specifically, lots of counting. He looks for things that cross state borders (objects, capital, information, people), and uses these as proxies for the “global.” He then counts how many of these things move, but not across frontiers. With each set of numbers in hand, simple ratios show the proportion of each good that has been “globalized” – that is, the fraction of each economic activity that is practiced across national-state lines.
By this definition of globalization, the conclusions are stark. Against the views of such figures as Henry Ford (who said that cars and planes were inexorably “binding the world together”), or Martin Heidegger (“everything is equally far and equally near”), Ghemawat finds that first-generation immigrants represent only 3 percent of the world’s population. Overseas students are just 2 percent of the world’s university population. About 90 percent of the world’s people never leave the country of their birth. Even the internet stays surprisingly close to home: between 2006 and 2008, only about 17–18 percent of electronic traffic crossed any national border. These striking findings are echoed in his specifically economic data: fewer than one in a hundred American companies have any operations overseas, and only a fifth of venture capital leaves its country of origin. “Global” companies usually seek profit by selling locally differentiated products, not aiming to impose uniform goods. They shy away from trying to homogenize the world: McDonald’s use of different spices in Mexico, or its stress on selling vegetarian (rather than beef) burgers in India, would be an obvious example. Only 20 percent of the world’s aggregated GDP involves cross-border export transactions, and this slice of economic activity is the first to be reversed in downturns. During the deep crisis of 2008, for instance, foreign direct investment fell abruptly (by nearly half), and multinational corporations suddenly and dramatically shortened their supply chains.
They did so by pulling back into core geographic spaces, precisely the places where people already felt deep ties of culture and proximity. Ghemawat thus comes back to the powerful, continuing effects of national borders, and with them, the lasting psychological/cultural power and institutional/bureaucratic frameworks of states – even in an ostensibly multinational, global era – through structuring practices like treaties, tariffs, or passports. (See chapter above by McKeown.) Such practices shape global trade, Ghemawat finds, in ways not captured by aggregated global statistics. Sharing a common language – such as English – increases two countries’ trade substantially (by 42 percent); a common currency – such as the euro – is still more powerful (114 percent); most important of all is the historical experience of a shared colonial past (188 percent). Yet notwithstanding such lubricants to economic activity, even where trade should flow freely across interstate borders, it often stops. By way of example, World 3.0 considers at length the US-Canadian frontier: a place with geographic proximity, a shared language (Quebec excepted), a largely shared history, even formal treaties that guarantee free trade (the North American Free Trade Agreement). If globalization is “ripping through people’s lives” (Arundhati Roy), in other words, surely it can be found here. Yet instead Ghemawat finds a long list of impediments: after 9/11, for instance, triple the previous time was abruptly required for trucks to cross. Even in such apparently smooth and well-oiled locations, the onrushing global economy has a long way to go.
Global Politics: International Relations and Comparative Politics
Political science offers another avowedly scientific approach to general patterns (“laws”) of human social behavior. Its practitioners – at least in the most “global” subfields of international relations (IR) and comparative politics (CP)5 – share with economists the goal of generating testable (falsifiable), empirically grounded knowledge. Many political scientists pursue large-n comparative and quantitative analyses, seeking to understand cross-cultural and global phenomena (such as “democracy,” or “authoritarianism,” or “party politics”). Others use qualitative methods to study such issues in narrower view, using smaller samples and paying more attention to contextual factors.6 Both groups seek to balance theoretical parsimony and completeness. Parsimony – an ideal also pursued by natural scientists – means elegance: finding the simplest model, mathematical or conceptual, that explains or predicts a given phenomenon. Completeness, on the other hand, reduces the number of outlying or excluded cases, incorporating contextual variables and considering the explanatory role of case-specific factors such as local structures, historical legacies, or individual leaders’ traits. Such inclusiveness complicates (or, to critics, muddles) the overall picture, and makes it harder to reach straightforward, unambiguous conclusions. Given that the world is a complicated place, though, the recognition of particular and contingent factors also makes it possible to explain actual outcomes more compellingly. In either case, most political scientists agree that knowledge should be practically useful and relevant: they are much more likely than historians to pursue present-focused and policy-linked questions (such as water conflicts, religious conflicts, epidemics, poverty, or development initiatives). Disciplinary standing accrues to those whose ideas are clearly applicable to, and ideally predictive of, politics in the here and now – whether at a local, domestic, interstate, or global level.
“International relations” and “comparative politics” appear perfect candidates to generate optics for global analysis. IR’s very name suggests attention to worldwide connections, specifically cross-state and interregional interactions, while CP raises anew the potential of comparative approaches. (See chapter by Adas.) Until recently, however, both subfields defined their objects of study in a way that, like Ghemawat, privileged the political practices of modern national states. They thus tended to presuppose a state framework, focusing on national-level institutions as key actors, not asking about wider “global” categories in ways world historians might welcome. Political science’s distinction between “large-n” and “small-n” approaches usually rested on the number of nationalcases scholars incorporated into a study (large-n work compared dozens of countries; small-n approaches could involve just three or four, sometimes from the same region). CP scholarship often presupposed the national scale in defining units to be “compared,” while IR focused on international relations, that is, interactions of states. This meant that countries usually appeared as irreducible units, acting like billiard balls bouncing into each other: ricocheting in new directions, yes, but remaining basically self-contained. In the judgment of disciplinary observers like Navnita Behera, the Westphalian state still serves fundamentally as “the epistemological base of IR” (Tickner and Waever 2009: 35). One could qualify such broad-brush statements, of course, but they hold more than a grain of truth.
Especially in IR, though, this state-centered approach has been shifting, and recent work shows political scientists developing more genuinely global methods. More than a generation ago one group of IR scholars started to pose questions similar to those asked in this book. To wit: whose “globe”? How far has an ostensibly general disciplinary perspective (“international relations”) been shaped by unrecognized forms of institutional, cultural, and intellectual provincialism? How different would “international relations” be as an academic domain if IR had not been defined by professors at a small subset of Western/Northern (especially US) universities? In 2003 the International Studies Association convened IR scholars from around the world to explore the powerful role of “geocultural epistemologies” in shaping the field. This group of critics within IR has since shown the potential benefits of “worlding” a discipline – and the costs of not doing so.
In a classic article from 1984, republished a quarter-century later with new data, Thomas Bierstecker (2009) demonstrated that US-based IR scholars occupy a position of theoretical hegemony, yet are often not even aware of the parochialism of their interests – how their agenda (and thus, the priorities of the “field”) is deeply shaped by American methodological predispositions and US government priorities. (See also Marlin-Bennett 2011.) As American journals, universities, and foundations set the agenda for disciplinary debate, theoretical disputes that matter in the US tend to be deemed of general interest. This has meant that rationalist, positivist, and quantitative approaches dominate the disciplinary core of IR. When Bierstecker canvassed the field’s top 10 PhD programs (all at US universities), such approaches represented more than two-thirds (69 percent) of the programs’ assigned readings. Most had been written by men (in proportions from 65 percent to 92 percent), and nearly all – with only rare exceptions, such as Thucydides – published in the last 15 years. Every single required reading at all 10 programs, moreover, had been assigned in English; only one top department (MIT) assigned as much as 3 percent of its readings to works that originated in other languages. Most striking, nearly all of this canonical scholarship had been written by US-based specialists (an overwhelming average of 94 percent). By this measure Harvard ranked as exemplarily cosmopolitan: its corpus of required readings was merely 89 percent US-authored. The most extreme case, the University of Michigan, assigned its PhD students fully 99 percent American-written materials. US scholars’ ideas were widely known around the world, Bierstecker concluded, and were cited routinely by colleagues in Europe, Asia, and Africa, but the reverse was far from true.
It is easy to see the problems that result from an “intellectual condominium” so fully dominated by Anglophone and US scholars.7 In Bierstecker’s full-throated critique,
it is easy to be content as a US scholar of international relations. You do not have to “bother” with other languages. Everyone speaks your language (English), and appears to be using your principal frameworks and theoretical understandings. You can travel throughout the world making references to IR theory entirely produced by other American scholars, and most of your audience will be familiar with the basic texts, if not all of the latest arguments. The problem is, however, that “they” can speak in languages and discourses that “we” Americans cannot understand. They may also have important insights and adaptations of our arguments that we cannot comprehend or benefit from, either due to linguistic or epistemological barriers. English has become the global lingua franca, not only for global business, but for global academia. While everyone may be speaking the same language, however, the core concepts and ideas may not always have the same meaning in translation. Identical concepts may be interpreted or understood differently, and these differences can at times be profound. Thus, there is a danger that by reading only other American scholars, by assigning virtually no translations of works published in other parts of the world, and by operating largely within a single rationalist and positivist theoretical framework, American International Relations will be less able to perceive counter-hegemonic developments, trends, resistances, and tendencies in the world. (2009: 324)
Similar issues are evident in comparative politics, where they again produce ethnocentric assumptions and unstated provincialism, even in self-declared attempts to globalize the field. The point does not need to be belabored, but take one recent example from CP, the latest book by the prominent American scholar Francis Fukuyama. In The Origins of Political Order (2011) Fukuyama sets out explicitly to use a global, transhistorical approach to explain the core story of modern politics: the rise of human particularism and difference, conceived around the nation-state. Unlike IR scholars who look for politics happening outside the state, or on a global scale, Fukuyama keeps the national frame at the center of his story. His book moves historically, tracing the appearance of states and the rise of nations around the world. The long-term trajectory is plain: more and more of the world is moving inexorably toward “modern liberal democracy” – the type of state already on display in the United States, Canada, Australia, and others descended from a (West) European lineage. This model is widely copied, he argues, for the simple reason that it is the most powerful, and also most attractive, form of political organization the world has ever seen.
Fukuyama defines modern liberal democracy – the entity he sees as the destination of world politics – as a tripartite combination of state power (measured at the national level), rule of law, and governmental accountability. The effectiveness, and the appeal, of such a combination, he says, is attributable to fundamental human nature: people are both social and competitive beings, and this system best meets their needs. It evolved, though, only by fits and starts, in different places over thousands of years. China is the key starting point for Fukuyama’s comparative history, as state power began there, driven largely by military necessity. Chinese state power, however, lacked legal constraints on the ruler, so in the end it created only “high-quality authoritarianism” (2011: 313). Law started in India, with its more “sophisticated” religious ideas, yet there lacked a strong state (a South Asian failure Fukuyama explains by way of social and religious differences such as caste, and a mysterious lack of protracted warfare). The Islamic Middle East then combined these two elements, although Fukuyama says its Arab parts subsequently lost their connection to law. (Given the vast corpus of Muslim legal scholarship, one wonders about this assertion.) Only in Western Europe did legal accountability begin, thanks to the continent’s unique combination of geographic, economic, social, and cultural factors (2011: 22, 160).
Origins thus uses a “global” approach, with a world-spanning argument that covers several thousand years. Yet not all globes are created equal: Fukuyama ends by placing US-style politics as an endpoint of world political history. (He is now writing a second volume, covering the industrial era and presumably explaining a similar spread of capitalist economies.) Leaving aside the Whiggish teleology, though, and not belaboring the reductionism that posits simple “essences” of each society (e.g., “China” is lastingly authoritarian), note instead how Fukuyama treats the nation-state – approaching it not as an intellectual obstacle or a hindrance to globally oriented scholarship, but as the perfect framework for worldwide comparative study. As such he serves as a counterweight to many other scholars mentioned here, who as a group try to reconceptualize a world without the primacy of national identities or necessarily seeing “countries” as the self-evident scale at which human social life should be studied.
Fukuyama concedes little to such objections, seeking rather to refocus attention on the nation-state. He acknowledges the importance of very few border-crossing actors (such as the Catholic Church or the Islamic caliphate). His tale of global politics unfolds almost entirely through self-contained, separate cases. As he unapologetically explains,
Almost all of the stories told in this book involve single societies and the interplay among different domestic political actors within them. International influences appear largely as a result of war, conquest or the threat of conquest, and the occasional spreading of religious doctrines across borders. … But looking at the globe as a whole, development tended to be highly compartmentalized by geography and region. (2011: 476)
Only in today’s world, ironically, does Fukuyama see global borders as notably flexible or porous – as countries everywhere are now, at last, able to emulate the superior Euro-American model of liberal democracy.
Not all comparativists keep the nation-state so central, of course, nor do all IR specialists frame their work as investigating only state-to-state diplomatic or policy interactions. To see some of the other possibilities, consider a very different recent publication in political science. Who Governs the Globe?, co-edited in 2010 by Deborah Avant, Martha Finnemore, and Susan Sell, showcases scholarship on “governance” that uses a global lens to reconceive the core subject and methods of IR. Avant, Finnemore, and Sell openly criticize previous state-centered theories, which by staying focused on governmental structures at the national level and facilitating the billiard-ball-type view of state interactions make it too easy for IR analysts to treat a messy, complicated world as simple and predictable. Instead, they look at the globe in a more complex way. This involves seeing the world at once – as a whole – but also moving continually up and down in scales of analysis, crossing levels and weaving back and forth (2010: 368). Actual actors – dubbed “global governors,” that is, “authorities who exercise power across borders for purposes of affecting policy” (2010: 2) – stay in view at every step. Such governors vary widely in form, size, location, and purpose; they include international organizations, multinational corporations, and advocacy groups, among others. They also interact – competing, collaborating, sharing workloads, and fighting over the outcomes of policy debates – at every level of scale.
This variation, and the idea of pursuing “governors” across spatial scales, is a key contribution to IR methodology, and it has obvious ties with world-historical scholarship.8 Contributors to Who Governs the Globe? use this flexibility to study how global systems take shape (one essay considers air-traffic control rules; another looks at worldwide regulation of electrical standards for home appliances). They use a range of methods, from statistical analysis and probit regressions through abstract theories of club organization. But every author keeps agency in each story, thus addressing a key objection to any globally scaled study, including in world history. Concrete people and identifiable groups, not faceless “forces,” make things happen: they set agendas, define issues, write rules, implement and enforce norms, make states act, and monitor and adjudicate outcomes.
In one exemplary essay, for instance, Clifford Bob (2010) traces the emergence of small-arms trafficking as an international issue. To do so he charts competition among two networks of states, nongovernmental organizations, and advocacy groups, each trying to mobilize authority for its cause. On one side, he finds the United Nations, the International Action Network for Small Arms, and many governments, mostly European and African. On the other, he discusses the World Forum on the Future of Sport Shooting Activities, advocacy groups like the National Rifle Association (NRA), and a group of other governments, especially the US. Perhaps not surprisingly, one finds conflict at every level, with competing efforts to find allies and secure binding legal outcomes. Rational deliberation, and efforts to persuade audiences of the merits of one’s case, play at most a secondary role in the face of deep transnational and ideological divisions. Crucially, the ultimate outcome – as seen in the IR arena of international politics – only makes sense if one considers the interlocking roles of actors on all these levels. The globe is more than the sum of its parts – yet simultaneously, each part is also always shaped by that globe.
Global Anthropology: Ethnographies of the World
To a wider public, anthropologists are self-evidently “global” – journeying around the world to study the inner workings of obscure tribes and ostensibly alien peoples. Such efforts, frequently in remote places like Nepal or Papua New Guinea, chronicle the full tapestry of human behavior, in all its variability and complexity, showing few if any traits to be universal (“human nature”). Although some anthropologists actually work much closer to home (e.g., writing an ethnography of an American high school) they still take nothing for granted, placing subjects into a wider framework and working to relativize the apparently familiar. Cultural and linguistic anthropologists, the practitioners of the subfields upon which I concentrate, share with political scientists and economists a broader identity as social scientists. Yet relying on methods of “participant observation” – rather than databases or calculations at a distance – makes them more sensitive to their personal effects on the knowledge they produce. People act differently, first of all, when anthropologists are around; and anthropologists then make sense of what they see through categories that make sense tothem. Cultural, social, and linguistic anthropologists address such issues by generating knowledge that is self-reflective, qualitative, particular, and contextual.9 They have much in common with historians, occupying a middle position among the five “globes,” roughly halfway between the hard social sciences and more humanistic and artistic approaches.
Global thinking in anthropology has its own deeper history (Handler 2009; Brettell 2009). In the nineteenth century, as “anthropology” took shape as a separate discipline, some of its most prominent figures maintained that human societies were developing along a common, evolutionary trajectory. They looked for global patterns of human development, and debated local cultural practices in terms of their origins: for example, had behaviors diffused outward from a single point, or had similar behaviors arisen independently in different places? This work involved a range of comparisons, holding the lifeways of one group up against another. Such approaches fell into disfavor after 1900, thanks especially to the work of Franz Boas, who argued strongly against evolutionary frameworks – contending that anthropologists should not see all human societies as marching in common patterns of development (which meant some would be “leading” and some “backward”), but instead should focus on the careful study of individual cultures, at much smaller levels of scale. Some anthropologists did still pursue the sorts of large-n statistical methods that became prominent in political science (as in the anthropological Human Relations Area Files, which started at Yale in the 1940s). Structural and functionalist approaches, especially in Britain, also undertook cross-cultural comparisons. Most anthropologists, however, thought too much detail was lost in making such comparisons across space; some went so far as to call the act of generalization itself “oppressive.”10 By the 1970s the field had moved away from large-scale analysis and increasingly toward the production of finely grained, rigorous “thick descriptions” (as Clifford Geertz put it) of particular cases.
Such a shift pushed cultural anthropologists toward more fragmented kinds of analysis, and away from explicitly global questions. Why, then, is the field relevant for world historians today? Partly because anthropological training remained global, in a simple but important sense pointed out by Daniel A. Segal: students learned about the field by reading about people, places, and issues from all over the world. (In a stark contrast with disciplinary history, where PhD students could qualify by reading hundreds of books and then writing a dissertation, all focused on just one small place, e.g. a part of Europe.) By mid-century, too, the cultural formations anthropologists studied started to lose some of their boundedness. Topics that spilled over regional or national borders, such as international migration or diasporas, emerged as legitimate areas for anthropological-ethnographic study. Eric Wolf went farther: in a now-classic book, Europe and the People without History, he set out to write nothing less than “global anthropology,” using Marxian ideas of structure to focus on “interlocking networks of human interaction” that stretched around the world (1982: 24). James Clifford (1997) wrote about cultures themselves “traveling,” becoming deterritorialized and hybrid. Arjun Appadurai’s (1996) work on globalization (already discussed in Anne Gerritsen’s chapter) focused on new cultures created in transnational spaces, where people are connected by cross-border flows (of people, machines, money, information, or ideas). Still other scholars, such as Michael Wesch (2009), have taken up these elements to explore new global domains through “digital ethnography,” in which human interconnections of far-flung individuals can emerge from, be mediated by, and be formed through newly created electronic forms. Comparison also rebounded to some degree, albeit usually focused on small-n studies, more carefully contextualized and better able to withstand the variabilities of scale and time (Gingrich and Fox 2002; de Munck 2000).
Another strand of anthropological work, perhaps less well known to historians than Wolf or Appadurai and thus worth highlighting here, has particular relevance to connective approaches in world and global history. Growing out of a wider debate about “multi-sited ethnography,” cultural and linguistic anthropologists have developed methods to produce geographically dispersed – and variably scaled – ethnographic analysis. George Marcus, with whom the term “multi-sited ethnography” is most closely associated, has described (1995) the benefits of going beyond classic single-sited ethnography. The traditional approach, he pointed out, encourages anthropologists to see fieldsites in hermetic terms, more or less self-contained bubbles; it risks ignoring interactions with a wider, even global world system. (See also Ferguson 2006.) In its place Marcus proposed trackingmobility – of things, people, ideas – between places. Putting “circulation” at the center of ethnographic study required scholars to think about simultaneously analyzing different places, and seeing their mutually shaping interactions – similar to the approaches of connective world history. (It also produced a firestorm of debate among anthropologists, some of whom saw the multi-sited idea as methodologically suspect, even dangerous, not unlike the critique of world historians for undercutting their discipline’s ideas about rigorous archival scholarship.11)
The work of Anna Tsing offers a fine example of such an approach put into practice, standing as an important contribution to both cultural and linguistic anthropology. Her monograph Friction (2005), subtitled An Ethnography of Global Connection, is the logical place to begin. Tsing, a veteran of fieldwork in southeastern Asia, starts the book in Indonesia, asking why local communities in a forest area, the Meratus mountains of South Kalimantan, suddenly saw their trees felled, and village social relationships upended, during the 1980s and 1990s. Her conclusion, like Marcus’s, is that such outcomes cannot be understood through study in Kalimantan alone, or even only in Indonesia, but through a “connective ethnography” that ties together various geographic arenas – and different scales of human activity. Village inhabitants played a key role, yes, along with illegal loggers who suddenly appeared in the Meratus from other parts of Indonesia; but also state officials in Djakarta who struggled through political revolution in 1998, and had to rethink national-level development policies; multinational corporations in Canada that launched lumber and mining projects halfway around the world to impress shareholders; and transnational constituencies of environmental activists who brought political templates from Brazil and financial pressures to bear in the United States.
Tsing works at each of these levels, following stories (she calls them “packages”) from place to place, employing methods that are, in turn, ethnographic, journalistic, and archival – and paying careful attention to how the stories change. She is particularly interested in ideas that purport to stretch beyond their points of origin, staking ostensibly universal claims (about “prosperity,” for instance, or freedom, or environmental justice) and how these are translated into new forms at different social levels. Such packages, she says, are special: they are “scale-making projects” (2005: 57–58), and they tie together the globe. For Tsing, scale amounts to much more than a useful scholarly category. Scale itself – specifically, humans’ claims about it – actually produces the globe. She argues that one can see the globe by studying this process of claims-making.
Another crucial idea (embedded in the book’s title) is that all of this motion around the world does not simply “flow,” in the facile terms of market theorists and no small number of historians. Rather, as stories, people, objects, and money move, they encounter different terrains. In some they thrive, and in others they falter; in any case, the packages shift, taking on new codings and resonances before traveling onward. This neverending process she calls “friction,” in which all the world’s cultures are brought into being only through their encounters with others. The “traction” that packages gain in various places shows, first, the ongoing interactions between all layers of scale. Yet these interactions also preserve cultural diversities of all kinds – leaving the differences always to “simmer within global connections” (2005: xiii). The worldwide human story is thus never reducible to one of homogeneity or sameness. The picture that emerges is admittedly fragmentary: but this fact, for Tsing, is precisely the point. Fragments may not be systematic, but neither are they random or happenstance, mere flotsam on a global sea. Their fragmentary character is instead productive, “interrupting” smooth master narratives of global power and development. Friction shows the concreteness of awkward human encounters – bumps in the road of actual, lived global interaction (2005: 271).
Tsing has also coedited a collection of essays (with a Japanese historian, Carol Gluck) that extends this method and pushes it in explicitly cross-disciplinary directions; it thus serves as a good transition to the next “globe” (of comparative literature). Tsing and Gluck’s book Words in Motion: Toward a Global Lexicon (2009) tracks words – individual words – as they move through space and time, around the world. Words move between languages and political systems, across borders and within societies and institutions. Some of these words may be big (“democracy”), some appear smaller (“commission”), while others sit in the ideological margins (“adat” in Indonesia, “secularism” in Morocco). Tsing contends that by following individual words, and seeing what happens as they travel, scholars can productively deploy their expertise and deep knowledge about particular places and peoples (something traditionally trained historians would welcome), but that adopting the method of word-tracing enables them to do so without reifying any of the customary units or social frameworks (culture, nation, race, “area”).
Words appear concrete, graspable, firm: the ability to document precise words in primary documents is, after all, what historians take as hard evidence. When someone uses a word, orally or on paper, it is easy to think that on some basic level readers (or listeners) know what they mean. Tsing and Gluck, however, argue that in practice, this certainty rapidly blurs. Words accumulate meanings and resonances. They work differently at different scales and in disparate social arenas. Their spatial motion maps a dizzying array of pathways around the world. Tsing contends that words (like “packages,” but smaller) interlock scales, as they travel from national to global arenas and percolate down to street level. Yet every street is different: Tsing argues that the entanglement of words thus unfolds into an unpredictable multitude of global stories, not a common narrative (Tsing and Gluck 2009: 11–17). Words in Motion’s essays on Southeast Asia, Turkey, and Japan, for example, stress the mutability of words; but articles about Europe and the Arabic Middle East focus on stabilization and impositions of meaning. Words – a perhaps unexpected entrée into global study – show the communicative motion that is everywhere inherent in human life, but without imposing unitary views of a homogeneous globe.
Global Texts: Comparative Literature and Worlds of Translation
Specialists in literature wrestle with similar questions, but from a different disciplinary perspective. They share with historians basically similar source materials: words preserved in texts.12 Yet they approach texts quite differently. Treating a document as “literature” means analyzing it in an artistic/expressive/aesthetic sense, not principally to understand the historical contexts of a particular place and time. Historical context is valuable in literary scholarship, but from a reverse perspective: insofar as it sheds better light on a literary story. Literary texts, moreover, are usually written to reach an audience (of readers and other writers), some of whom respond with their own texts. Literary scholarship relies on this dialogic, interactive character – literature is comprised of individual works, but also is a conversation that develops through time. Hence literary scholars focus on texts that are circulated to audiences, rather than private materials such as diaries or letters. (They use such materials too, but again, mostly to illumine literary issues.)
The field of comparative literature (CL), a subdomain within this wider universe of literary scholarship, approaches textual materials in a distinctively cross-cultural, cross-regional, and even global manner. In recent years its influence has percolated widely, stretching the work customarily structured along lines of nation, ethnicity, and region: in departments of English, Slavic, Romance, or Asian languages and literatures, for instance. CL should therefore be well positioned to offer fresh ways of thinking and asking (literary) questions about the globe. Specialists in CL – especially in the subfield of “world literature” – are aware of world historians’ work, and draw on it while seeking also to broaden its content.
Most obviously this takes the form of arguing that world history as a field omits literature (and, more broadly, cultural life) at its peril. As Giles Gunn (2001) points out, Wallerstein’s theory of the modern world-system is typical in stressing the centrality of economic-political exchange and interdependencies. In Gunn’s view, however, such exchanges and interdependencies are cultural and aesthetic phenomena; for him, exchanges of meaning lie at the core of human history. Recognizing this fact would avoid what he sees as Wallerstein’s radical simplification, foreshortening, even misreading of the human story. Culture is more than the surface mystification of “real,” underlying systems or structures – it after all determines how such structures are understood, enacted, and ultimately undone.
The exchange not only of commodities and people but also of ideas, customs, rituals, technologies, religions, and perhaps, above all, languages, this expanding zone of communication, interaction, and eventual interdependence – which permitted circuits of meaning … was largely dependent on human capacities to create and inhabit, as well as challenge and revise, symbolic universes of shared, or at any rate sharable, meaning. (2001: 20–21)
Few world historians would dispute the potential enrichment of adding new source materials – paying more attention to cultural and literary materials alongside the political, social, and economic questions that are at the heart of world-historical writing. Beyond the add-and-stir benefits of including literature, however, I want to focus on three further ideas arising from a literary approach.13 First, what makes a particular work of writing approachable as “world literature,” and thus, how does CL think about the analytic category of world/global study? Second, how does a literary approach deal with the issue of translation: the cross-cultural movement of words and texts around the globe, not merely spatial/geographic mobility but also the epistemological shifts that come in new linguistic locations? What happens when words are translated, and inhabit new semantic spaces? Beyond that, how does CL assay the broader process of what might be called macrotranslation, in which quanta of meaning much larger than individual words move? How are full texts, authors, even entire genres “translated” into new places? Third, how does a literary approach allow us to think about time – can it put places around the world, and peoples long dead, into new comparative and connective relations? What fresh interlinkages and chronologies appear that historians may have overlooked?
David Damrosch addresses the first question squarely in his book What Is World Literature? (2003), a helpful overview on which I lean here. Scholars have offered many answers since 1827, when Goethe coined the term “world literature” (Weltliteratur). Goethe had in mind a small network of authors like himself – high-level, elite, mostly male – who read and reacted to each other’s work. This network stretched beyond any one language or place, although not everywhere: Goethe admitted the near-total absence of writers from, say, China or India. De Stael later developed a more nationalized model of literary study, one that had a lasting institutional impact. (Even writings that appeared before the existence of modern nations are now read, taught, and studied as part of “national heritages.”) In the twentieth century literary critics such as Northrop Frye (1957) took a different tack, looking around the globe to identify literary patterns or motifs that existed across cultures (“archetypes”), not unlike pre-Boasian approaches in anthropology or large-n efforts in political science. The consensus in CL today, however, is that such approaches lead mostly to empty generalities, not helpful insights into literary practices around the world.
Damrosch defines “world literature” neither as reducible to a collection of discrete national traditions, nor as a vast amalgam, an infinitude of everything that has ever been written – a “global babble” (as Janet Abu-Lughod memorably put it). Instead, he defines it as “a mode of circulation and of reading,” one that can be applied as readily to classics as to new publications, whole collections of texts as individual items. The key criteria are that texts must first be deemed literature (that is, not just any form of mass culture will do – a distinction ultimately based on standards and aesthetic judgments) and then that they circulate (that is, move outward into the world). Specifically, literary writing becomes “world literature” when it moves “beyond its linguistic and cultural point of origin” (2003: 5–6). The ambit of specialists in world literature is to study what happens when literature moves – what happens to Goethe’s work, for instance, when it is translated into English and read on the American prairie, or into Portuguese and read in Rio de Janeiro.
“World literature” is therefore oriented toward the crossing of borders, and the reading and rereading of texts in different global settings – giving rise to a vision of the world in multiplicity, not one captured by a master narrative, or reducible to known patterns. For Damrosch and like-minded scholars, there is no single “world literature” with a fixed, identifiable canon.14 Literary scholars need instead to move within the multiplicities, to be both multicultural and multitemporal. The temporal – historical – logic is crucial, as literature circulates for hundreds and even thousands of years. World literature therefore makes a strong argument for time depth as well as cultural breadth (Damrosch himself covers 4,000 years). As in world history, this does not mean world literature needs to cover absolutely everything. Choices have to be made, and I spell out some principal themes below. The starting point, though, as Vilashini Cooppan puts it, is to see world literature as a special kind of writing: one that is both “locally inflected and translocally mobile” (2001: 33).
As texts move away from their point of origin and cross into new cultures, they are read, reread, learned and argued about. This process happens in widely separated places, where the text’s original author, and his or her intentions, may be completely unknown. For Damrosch, this simple fact presents an argument against the sweeping objections of specialists – who long criticized world literature as shallow, shown (they asserted) by its propensity to get the details (as known to these specialists) wrong. Such critiques kept world literature marginal in the discipline of CL, relegated mostly to a pedagogical realm: perhaps appropriate for undergraduate survey classes, but hardly an area for serious scholarship.15 Yet a deep knowledge of Chinese culture, to take one example, would become less crucial when a Chinese poem moves overseas. Yes, knowing China’s literary history, with expertise in Chinese language and motifs, allows one to see how a text in its new locale diverges from its originary practices. One should learn texts’ original language if possible, and if this is not an option, get the details right by careful and diligent reading of specialized scholarship. National-cultural marks and forms persist when writings travel – Damrosch, Cooppan, and Gunn agree that national literatures are not on the verge of fading away. But world literature, fundamentally, calls for striking a balance: recognizing that specialists’ deep knowledge of particular places is essential, but it is not everything. It may not be much help in making sense of how a text is accepted into, and reworked by, foreign cultures, in ways shaped by their own traditions, forms, customs, and motifs.
World literature aims at a different purpose – one just as legitimate, and that complements rather than supplants national literary scholarship. Very few works are created entirely outside national traditions (The Thousand and One Nights, created by many different authors, may be one). Most begin within such a tradition, but are then “refracted” as they move. In the case of the hypothetical traveling poem from China, this refraction is world literature’s focus: it does not end matters merely to point out that a text would no longer count as a poem “back home.” As Damrosch points out:
Not only is this something that those of us who don’t read Chinese cannot judge; it is actually irrelevant to the poem’s existence abroad. All works cease to be the exclusive products of their original culture once they are translated; all become works that only “began” in their original language. The crucial issue for the foreign reader is how well the poems work in the new language … works of world literature take on a new life as they move into the world at large, and to understand this new life we need to look closely at the ways the work becomes reframed in its translations and in its new cultural contexts. (2003: 21, 24)
World literature treats such texts as “the locus of negotiation between two different cultures,” potentially subject to a “double refraction,” continually moving between them. Damrosch sees it as an ellipse, “with the source and host cultures providing the two foci that generate the elliptical space within which a work lives as world literature, connected to both cultures, circumscribed by neither alone” (2003: 283).16
Saying that literature is “refracted” as it moves is another way of saying that texts need to be translated. Translation, in all senses (linguistic, cultural, allegorical), thus also underpins the study of world literature – and translation studies is a well-developed theoretical and methodological arena in its own right, full of possibilities for world historians (Venuti 2004).17 World literature treats the process of translation as “a negotiation between ‘source’ and ‘target’ cultures,” illuminating literary values on each side and the triangulations that have to happen for meanings to move between them. Sometimes scholars examine successive translations of a single work (Damrosch traces an Egyptian poem’s forms through different translations, and follows wildly divergent readings of Mechtild, a thirteenth-century mystic). Sometimes they focus on a single translator working out how to bring a text to life (Nabokov, for instance, translating Lewis Carroll into Russian). Some contemporary works are said to be “born translated,” in Rebecca Walkowitz’s phrase: authors such as J.M. Coetzee, Kazuo Ishiguro, or Jamaica Kincaid publish books simultaneously in many languages, being “designed to travel” (Walkowitz 2009: 570–571).
A translation can range from the very literal (retaining as many details as possible from the source culture, with explanatory footnotes, even at the risk of “foreignizing” a text) to the very flexible (attempting to assimilate the text entirely to its new surroundings, finding not just equivalent words but also corresponding accents, images, and references in the target culture).18 The choices translators make vary along this spectrum, and therein lies the tale. Dryden, for example, sought to translate Virgil into English “as he himself would have spoken” – yet English did not exist in Virgil’s time, 2,000 years ago (Damrosch 2003: 167–168). What to do? The decisions he made tell world literary scholars something important about Dryden – and perhaps about Virgil too.
This type of translation studies looks at the movement of words, sentences, thoughts, from one language into another. A different sort of translation happens when texts are read around the world, but in shared languages not identified with the local culture. Think of publications in Arabic, Spanish, or French: they spread without the need for formal cross-linguistic translation. As geographically dispersed tongues, each is spoken – admittedly with regional/dialectal differences – by different regional, ethnic, racial, and national groups. English is the most extreme case. As the world’s first truly global language, today it is spoken to some degree in more than 100 countries, and has spread its influence through forms such as the novel.19 Some scholars of comparative literature decry this pervasiveness as a straightforward sign of power in global culture – the cultural corollary to, and outgrowth of, European colonialism and corporate-industrial capitalism. This view emphasizes the coercive aspects of widespread English, and applauds the propagation of texts in other languages (Owen 1990). Such critics point out that actually existing “world literature” today is less grandly inclusive than its pretensions, given authors’ need to translate texts into English to reach a global audience. Because the circulation of texts varies greatly by language of origin, too, writers are helped hugely by their proximity to economic, political, and institutional centers.20
Yet this critique, valuable as it is, only goes so far – since power never works only in one direction. Exploring concrete translations, at all levels of scale, allows scholars to see the unexpected complications – the bumpy literary encounters that recall Tsing’s “friction.” Chinua Achebe, to take one prominent example, writes as an African, and in English, to reach a worldwide audience. In doing so, however, he intends nothing less than to remake English itself. As he puts it:
The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use. The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a medium of international exchange will be lost. He should aim at fashioning out an English which is at once universal and able to carry his particular experience. … I feel that English will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings. (1975, quoted by Damrosch 2003: 225–226)
Alexander Huang deals with a different level of metatranslation – beyond the level of words or individual texts, to an authorial corpus and beyond – to show the complexities of global literary movement. Taking Shakespeare, the English literary icon par excellence, as an example of “culture that moves,” he studies Shakespearean drama as it crosses borders, specifically into China. He finds nothing like a straightforward tale of English prestige or power crushing Chinese forms and voices. Instead, his book Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange shows an ongoing process of adaptation – “the mutually constitutive grammar of the global and the local” (2009: 5–6) – in which Shakespeare is brought into China, translated, but completely reworked. The Shakespearean corpus was integrated into preexisting Chinese dramatic forms, such as xiqu(stylized regional theaters, sometimes called “Chinese opera”) and huaju (spoken dramatic theater). It surely influenced their development. But the plays, too, changed, departing from their modes of presentation in the Anglophone West. They took on new lives in Asia: Huang cites a political debate in November 2006 in Taiwan (a place never subjected to English colonial rule) in which the premier, Su Tseng-chang, quoted Julius Caesar to demonstrate support for the president, Chen Shui-bian. Other (remarkably literate) politicians then cited different passages from the same play to express their agreement or disagreement about Taiwan’s future policy direction.
As Shakespeare’s plays were staged in China, they became emblematic of groups within the Chinese artistic scene, who then reexported them to the world. Chinese Shakespeare plays thus serve as exemplars of Chinese – but also global – culture, and they ultimately influenced Shakespearean theater outside China too. Huang sees it as a collaborative process, in which Shakespeare and China serve as interacting “syntactical categories” that generate new meanings. Such collaborations happen in concrete, specific places – “global localities” – where Shakespeare’s plays now reside in an interstitial space, between the texts’ point of origin and the cultural terrains they came to inhabit (2009: 21–23).
This in-betweenness produces complicated outcomes. Huang cites the 1997 staging of a multilingual King Lear – with English subtitles, but in which the characters spoke different (Asian) languages. “The power-thirsty eldest daughter (performed cross-dressed) spoke only Mandarin and employed jingju chanting and movements,” whereas Lear “spoke only Japanese and walked the stage in the solemn style of [Japanese] no performance.” The performance was hugely controversial in Asia – for reasons that would have entirely escaped Western-trained Shakespearean experts. “Seen afar from the European perspective, the contrasts between the Asian languages and styles were flattened by their similarities. However, seen from an Asian perspective, the difference between Asian cultures was accentuated by the performance” (2009: 3–4). Asian audiences read the performance as politically inflected, and powerful: as making a sharp comment on Chinese-Japanese differences, today and in the recent past (the World War II era).
Genre – whether the multi-act stage plays of Shakespeare, the novel, or haiku – serves as an even grander structuring element of literature, accompanying texts as they move through space and time. Global genres connect readers in wildly different places, beyond a specific text or even the best-known authors: once one knows its form, a novel (or a sonnet, or a play) can reach audiences separated by hundreds of years or thousands of miles, and in dozens of languages. Or so it appears to readers who think they know how to decipher these forms (Walker 1994). What does it mean to think about translating genres, the largest scale of literary metatranslation? How can scholars trace changes in, and influences on, the edges and forms of genres? These genre-based questions ultimately suggest the most radical ideas from comparative literature, at least from a historian’s perspective: that scholars can forget their conventional norms of historical time.
The literary critic Fredric Jameson is closely associated with this line of thought. Jameson’s writings are too complex to distill here, but, long influenced by Marxian ideas, he has argued (against postmodern and structuralist critiques) that texts cannot be fully divorced from their social and cultural contexts – an idea that would be welcome to most historians. His idea of “postmodern hyperspaces” suggest a means by which to make sense of cross-border flows, and he has analyzed the “disjointedness of time” in modern global life (see Jameson and Miyoshi 1998). He is interested in genre, too, and specifically its link to temporality (as well as culture). Genres, as Ian Baucom has summarized this aspect of Jameson’s thought, “travel through time. Synchronically present in a given moment, genres also link that moment, diachronically, to earlier moments, earlier times. At the level of form … genre is the presence of the past in the present” (2001: 163). Baucom goes on to call dominant genres, such as the novel, “an epistemological structure” that spreads throughout the globe. It seems to subordinate future texts to itself, by forcing them to conform – yet simultaneously it is “haunted by a ghost language” (the ideology of past generations) as an imprint, or aftereffect, of that same form.
By dropping linear notions of chronology and tracking literary forms around the world, world literature can propose startling new juxtapositions. Cooppan uses genre to teach her students to read across national borders – intentionally setting up juxtapositions (“polychronic encounters between texts” (2001: 31)) to illuminate the globe in motion, through these migrations of form. She calls her method “globalized reading,” and uses it to query the idea of a “canon” or “center” in world literature, showing instead an ongoing array of multiple influences. Students read the Pancatantra, a Sanskrit collection of stories about the natural world, alongside medieval European fables and the Thousand and One Nights; the Odyssey appears alongside Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Damrosch likewise suggests triadic juxtapositions to bring new comparisons and connections to light. Why, he asks, put together distant texts – such as Antigone, Shakuntala, and Twelfth Night? Because studying them together does something that intense investigation of them alone could never manage:
The effect of these combinations is very different from what we gain from a semester devoted to medieval Japan or to seventeenth-century France, and it is even different from the net effect of a semester on Japan followed by a semester on France. Immersion in a single culture represents a mode of relatively direct engagement with it, aptly symbolized by efforts to acquire “near-native fluency” in the culture’s language. Reading and studying world literature, by contrast, is inherently a more detached mode of engagement; it enters into a different kind of dialogue with the work, not one involving identification or mastery but the discipline of distance and of difference. We encounter the work not at the heart of its source culture but in the field of force generated among works that may come from very different cultures and eras. (2003: 299)
Literature transports readers to new worlds – to mental times and places far remote from their own. To some scholars this mind-altering aspect of literature justifies, even necessitates, combining authors who might never have been linked in the “real” world. Baucom (2001: 170), drawing on Althusser, suggests that literature is well positioned to rethink basic notions of temporality (here historians may grow queasy). We are misled in thinking of history as a series of “synchronic slices of time,” he says; such a view assumes that dispersed events and people all coexist according to a common clock and calendar, and are thus meaningfully contemporaneous “in the one and same present.” But what if there is no singular global moment, either now or in the past or future – what if there is no “homogenizing, leveling, everywhere available time of modernity”? Time could be better seen as complexly constituted, through overlapping and intersecting arrays of many different local chronologic regimes, each with its “peculiar rhythms.” These are, surely, not always separate; but it is only if and when they do confront and perturb one another that we see a “globe,” or at least part of one. Scholars should thus seek these sites of mixing, where life is simultaneously of different “centuries,” with mixed tongues and genres (“heteroglossic, heterochronic language[s]”), from novels to consumer capitalism to Marxist deconstruction. Baucom thinks that in such locales we start to see the globe.
Wai Chee Dimock goes yet farther in juxtaposing texts across time. In an article called “Literature for the planet” (2001), she uses the fact that the poet Osip Mandelstam always carried with him a copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy as more than an interesting tidbit. She argues it shows literature is a continuum stretching across time and space, and that authors – like these from the fourteenth and twentieth centuries, living in completely different cultures – can be “inseparable.” “Literary space and time,” she writes, “are conditional and elastic; their distances can vary, can lengthen or contract, depending on who is reading and what is being read. … Two thousand years and two thousand miles can sometimes register as near simultaneity; ten years and ten miles can sometimes pose an unpassable gulf” (2001: 174). She agrees with Baucom that there is no single universal present, no temporal plane that synchronizes the globe. A book may be being read “right now” by thousands of readers, but the readings do not line up neatly; and the words, as they are encountered by many eyes, elicit thousands of separate resonances, antecedents, and meanings.
Dimock concentrates on this “temporal disunity among readers,” which underpins her view of Dante and Mandelstam – in which the Divine Comedy effectively resides throughout time. It exists, she says, not just in many places but also in different centuries, present anywhere (and anywhen) its meanings gain traction with readers. Dimock then comes back to the geographic dimension (the reach of global readership) to argue that literature has an unparalleled, sweeping worldwide power. Unlike Benedict Anderson, who famously held that literature (and print culture generally) stitched together vernacular spaces and turned them into nations, Dimock maintains the reverse: that literature deeply unsettles the nation-state. Books can be burned, but literature is tough: it outlasts political units, and gives readers horizons that “play havoc with territorial sovereignty.” Dimock ultimately portrays literature as “an artificial form of ‘life’ – not biological like an organism or territorial like a nation but vital all the same,” and “a species tougher than most” (2001: 175). Literature, stretching thousands of years and all around the globe, is, in this telling, glue for the deepest human story.
Global Art: Aesthetics across Cultures
Finally, humans see. That biological fact – the normative sightedness of the human body – suggests that “the visual” is a realm with transhistorical, transcultural resonance. The details vary, of course, but eyes are crucial for navigating the tasks of everyday human life. Not surprisingly, the metaphors of sight permeate human languages. Blindness is a tragedy, a divine punishment, or a “disability”; when violently inflicted, it ranks among the most egregious attacks that one person can visit upon another. When people encounter others with whom they cannot speak – with whom they share no written or oral language – they may start by using visual signs and gestures to communicate. Think of colonial sources describing initial interactions with “savages” – or the way humans (at least those at NASA) represented our species to extraterrestrial beings, in drawings of human bodies and scientific symbols (as shown in Figure 33.1) that were bolted onto the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft in 1972–1973 and rocketed out of the solar system.
This essay, too, relies throughout on metaphors of lenses and the visual; so I end with the disciplines of seeing, to consider how the idea of “optics” is itself culturally bound. Art history, my focus here, arose as an academic discipline to study, interpret, and analyze the products of visual artists – those producing physical objects with aesthetic aims.21 Given the global universality of sight and the visual, and of human creativity, one might expect art historians to be far ahead in thinking through questions of world-scaled study. In the academy, though, art history has in fact only just started to explore the globe. In the words of James Elkins, who in 2006 named “going global” one of the field’s most pressing issues, world art studies remains a field in formation, at best “entrancingly disorganized.” Strikingly, in 2007 he found not a single scholar able or willing to write an overarching historical introduction to his book Is Art History Global?22
Figure 33.1 Our world’s visual greeting. This gold-anodized, 6-by-9-inch aluminum plaque, co-designed by Carl Sagan, uses graphics to tell possible alien viewers who we, humans, are. The symbols aim to show what we look like, how large we are, where we come from (in space), what we know (via chemical and mathematical notation), and when the spacecraft carrying the plaque was launched. Note the culturally bound aspects of an ostensibly universal image (e.g. using a raised hand as a gesture to connote goodwill).
Source: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), at http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/image/spacecraft/pioneer_plaque.jpg.
Disciplinary art history long told the story of human art through a heavily Eurocentric core narrative, one reminiscent of “Western Civ”-style tellings of human history. Most art history textbooks began with cave art, moved rapidly to Egypt and ancient Greece, and then skipped onward to medieval Europe. They lingered on early Gothic cathedrals and then slowed dramatically to trace the ebbs and flows of style, and the aesthetic conversations that ensued, among mostly European artists. “World art history,” when the term was even used, meant an agglomeration of national or regional stories, a few of which lay outside this European core. Although still overwhelmingly focused on Europe, the field widened after 1950 – such that by 2000 one could find many excellent studies of Chinese, or African, or Islamic art. Yet each tended to be studied as a world unto itself, with “histories” unfolding in developmental trajectories driven by internal aesthetic concerns and the innovations of individual artists. Most scholarship, even when it concerned the non-European world, still used Western themes and started with existing definitions of art and aesthetics – core notions hardly troubled by occasional encounters with art from elsewhere. No one even attempted a “full account of the interrelationships of visual cultures,” seeing such efforts as doomed both practically and epistemologically. By the 1990s art historians, as David Carrier puts it (2008: xxiii–xxv), had skipped straight from the old Eurocentrism to a new skepticism of large-scale metanarratives – and were not interested in synthesizing, connecting, or asking how the various parts might function together as part of wider artistic stories.
Recently this situation has changed, with promising global art-historical developments in both practice and theory. A small group of scholars is creating a new kind of “world art history,” drawing upon and extending global scholarship in other disciplines (Ziljmans and Van Damme 2008). One shared interest is the cross-cultural movement of art – how it is made, bought, sold, and displayed across national boundaries. The global art market today, and the sudden appearance of “global museums,” suggest that the contemporary art scene includes cross-border elements (Elkins et al. 2010).23 Sometimes this involves the purchase, repatriation, or traveling display of artworks as exemplars of national traditions (Chinese vases or terracotta soldiers, for instance). But beyond traveling exhibits or efforts to reclaim national patrimonies, contemporary art also now features artists who set out directly to confront issues of globalization. Some draw explicitly on influences that are “foreign” (that is, from places other than their own), while others use motifs and forms that are self-consciously deterritorialized and transnational. In either case, art historians see such moves as building a new kind of contemporary art: one that develops across, not within, borders, and that requires new modes of production, sponsorship, collecting, marketing, display, and analysis (Belting and Buddensieg 2009).
A few scholars are also reflecting critically on how art history as a field has long been shaped, intellectually and institutionally, by ethnoculturally framed points of departure. The discipline still exists mostly in the United States and Europe, with only a comparative handful of institutions elsewhere. This produces real difficulties in generating scholarship that vigorously engages issues of art and the aesthetic from non-European, non-American points of view. Elkins notes that scholarship in English is not often translated into other languages. Given the power of Euro-American scholars to define field-wide issues (as in IR), this Anglophone dominion effectively creates its own “lag,” putting speakers of Chinese, Hindi, Arabic and other languages into a position of “belatedness” without access to publications. Textbooks around the world, moreover, are still deeply nationalistic, structured to serve curricula that rarely reach outside the nation-state (students in Istanbul study Turkish and Ottoman Art, students in Mumbai, Indian Art, etc.). Most problematically, even in non-Western contexts, art history still usually “depends on Western conceptual schemata.” In China, for example, scholars “study Chinese art using the same repertoire of theoretical texts and sources – psychoanalysis, semiotics, iconography, structuralism, anthropology, identity theory. They frame and support their arguments in the same ways Western art historians do: with abstracts, archival evidence, summaries of previous scholarship, and footnoted arguments” (Elkins 2007: 19).
The first institutional signs of change are small and very recent. In 2005 programs in world art history started at Leiden and East Anglia. In 2009 Heidelberg hired a chair in “global art history,” intending to break beyond the hermetic, regionally framed analytic approaches that characterize the field. It launched a “cluster initiative” that replaced fixed regions with the idea of “mobile contact zones with shifting frontiers,” and concentrated research on migratory artists and public aesthetic spheres that could be linked to local and canonical as much as national discourses. The overall aim was to highlight artistic “entanglements” that lay beyond any individual nation, hoping instead to see “art and visual practices as polycentric and multivocal processes.”24
Alongside the institutional shifts, scholarship in world and global art history is starting to crystallize. The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, long known for its collection of Euro-American (especially French Impressionist) masterworks, held a major conference in late 2011 on the theme: In the Wake of the Global Turn: Propositions for an Exploded Art History without Borders. Some speakers came from India and Brazil, serving as proxies for the “world”; most presenters still came from European and American universities. But all gathered to discuss a basic issue: Could art be redefined as a sphere of global interactivity? Could disciplinary art history be restructured along lines of regional interactions or interregional collaborations, rather than as separate nation-state stories, or a center–periphery model? What would it do to the field to design a “radically decentered” world art history (as opposed to one recentered on a new place, e.g. Africa)?
Such gatherings clearly draw inspiration from other disciplines, not least from world historians who have already pursued border-crossing connectivity, modes of interaction, and analytic units that reach outside the nation-state. In art history, though, a few scholars are starting to use this global reorientation more fundamentally: to rethink the entire field, in a basic theoretical way. What does it means to rethink the field’s core ideas – art and the aesthetic – in ways that do not presuppose European-derived categories? Such a question would be tantamount to world historians asking (as they are only starting to do): How does the global view make one rethink the entire historical enterprise? Does the world-historical perspective force scholars to redefine “sources,” reconceive chronology, or redesign History’s basic methods? What are historians looking for in the archives, where else might they look – and how will they know what it means?
For theoretical art historians, stepping back to reconsider first principles means asking whether the visual itself, at least the visual sphere of “art,” is universal (global, human), or whether it too is inescapably culturally bound. Is it possible to talk about a global aesthetic? One group of art historians has addressed these questions by moving across disciplinary lines toward the natural sciences. Engaging biological questions of eyes and seeing, they argue that art scholars can draw productively on brain science to understand how people – all people – process and make sense of visual information. Proponents of this approach – such as John Onians (2008), who coined the term “Neuroarthistory” – contend that neuroscience could make art history global and non-ethnocentric by beginning with the underlying biology of how artists, and nonartists, perceive and process their surroundings.
For those inclined to more humanistic approaches, James Elkins has suggested that some ideas like space or time may be sufficiently universal to “travel,” relate to all cultures, and thus to reach beyond Western theories or narratives. David Summers has offered the most serious effort to date to theorize such an approach. In a massive book, Real Spaces (2003), he ambitiously aims to provide a theoretical basis for studying all human art, in all times, around the world. Summers does not focus on interregional interaction, nor does he compare different cultures’ art or look for grand patterns. He does draw on biology, but only briefly, and in a less technical or scientific mode than Onians (he stays away from neuroimaging studies). Summers starts with the notion that all human bodies share a basic spatiotemporal character – they are always located finitely in space and time. From that kernel he spins out a complicated theory of global art. His approach encompasses and, he asserts, supersedes previous theories of “the visual” and aesthetics, all of which are ultimately based on foundational notions of space.
Summers draws a key distinction between “real” spaces (physical places in the actually-existing world) and “virtual” spaces (representations of those physical spaces, created through human actions, as for example in drawings, which depict – but cannot capture – real space). He then traces all human creations through a cross-cultural approach he calls “metaoptical” space, which stretches general ideas of “aesthetics” around the globe and into deep time. For Summers, “art” can be expansively defined – potentially including anything made by a human being, anywhere, ever. The ultimate goal of Real Spaces is to situate all cultures alongside one another, in a common framework for discussion, not to privilege the terms of any one aesthetic realm as setting the terms for all others. Once an equal playing field is achieved, Summers holds, art history can explore the art that is actually produced around the world – both in specific places and in the interactive and comparative senses already discussed.
Summers’s book is widely admired as impressive and pioneering, but his universalizing argument has not been universally accepted. James Elkins, perhaps the most prominent advocate of “world art history” today (hence not an obvious foe), published a 30-page review of Real Spaces. It praised Summers’s care and insight, but also used Aztec, Indian, Swedish and other specific cases to question the transhistorical, transcultural applicability of Summers’s ideas about space.25 Elkins wrote that in the end Real Spaces remains bound to Western categories – that it ultimately expands and reworks classical (European) ideas of space to better accommodate artwork from other parts of the world.
Elkins has sketched other approaches that hold still more radical potential for global scholarship in art history. Some, such as Nancy Munn’s (1996) investigation of Australian Aboriginal ideas about landscape and place, or Wu Hung’s (1995) study of Chinese systems for classifying artifacts, may not appear “global,” but begin by seeking terms, categories, and ideas that emerge outside Western semantic or philosophical contexts. Most daunting of all are approaches that explicitly exclude any and all Western concepts. Scholars such as Cao Yiqiang (1997; 2008) want to begin with entirely different starting points – questioning the very Westernness of art history as an enterprise. This means abandoning shared disciplinary protocols such as citation practices; engaging new narrative structures such as those in ancient Indian or Chinese texts; and looking for new, non-Europeanate ways to conceive and depict the globe and modernity itself. (See also Henry 1994.) This approach, which echoes the objections of Vinay Lal (1999; 2003) (see chapter by Weinstein, above) and other radical critics of disciplinary world history, stands as the most eye-opening of all – holding the potential for a genuinely thoroughgoing and multicultural remaking of not just art history, but academia writ large. It also poses the starkest challenge to disciplinary coherence, by frontally questioning the very existence of “art history,” or for that matter “history,” as common enterprises that can be shared by scholars around the world.
Many Globes: Seeing a World
Many academic fields are engaging the globe – thinking about how to study a human world in all its global dimensions. Even the nonhistorical disciplines are reaching broadly, not just into contemporary manifestations of global encounter, but also deep into time. Some of these efforts will be useful to historians, others may not. Some authors in other fields are following paths that have already been traveled, and found wanting, by earlier generations of world historians. But others have found new approaches. This disciplinary excursion shows the potential for looking outside History’s own “globe” as historians seek new ways to compare, to connect, and to understand the human past. Other globes are also stretching space and time, drawing on theoretical arenas that range from the familiar (economics and culture) to the alien (neuroscience or aesthetics).
These efforts face some common obstacles, starting with the practical. First, given the wealth and institutional/intellectual hegemony of American and European universities, how can ideas about the world come from more parts of the world? Calls to involve many places are often heard but difficult to realize, given barriers of language, method, and resources. It is not clear, moreover, that scholars everywhere will see “the global” in the same pressingly urgent terms as Western theorists – indeed, critics of world history portray the recent rush into global thinking as another case of Western intellectual imperialism. Second, given that scholars are still trained in national and “area-studies” frameworks, how can any one person know enough about many places to speak globally? Exhortations to encourage multi-authored, collaborative scholarship are likewise easy to find in many different disciplines. As in disciplinary history, however, such calls have not gained much traction, thanks largely to the interlocking constraints of the actually-existing institutional world. (These include, prominently, tenure and promotion practices at Euro-American universities, and the power of disciplinary gatekeepers, which keep a firm emphasis on single-authored, monographic scholarship.) Even when such efforts take root – as in the International Studies Association’s seeding of work on IR’s “geocultural epistemologies,” or the International Comparative Literature Association’s three-decades-long support of a multi-authored collection on the world’s literature (Valdés and Hutcheon 1994) – they remain on the intellectual edges of disciplines, not overturning their terms.
Nevertheless these global approaches share a key proclivity both to challenge the existing institutional structures of academic work, and to introduce new intellectual categories of analysis – not to destroy their associated disciplines, but to enrich them. Globally scaled scholarship, in each of these “globes,” aims to generate new knowledge, for a particular set of purposes. The proponents of each “globe” see the benefits of taking a bird’s-eye view, contending that certain issues can only be seen at this level. Such a view is easy to maintain in an era of global climate change, capital mobility, and the World-Wide Web. Few if any, however, maintain that world-scaled perspectives should be exclusively used. For the most part these global writings also draw – diligently and rigorously – on the best scholarship at other levels too. Many scholars discussed here work simultaneously at multiple scales – not merely from a bird’s-eye view. They struggle to keep individuals, and their families, neighbors, and friends, in focus alongside grand forces and abstract structures. How can “local,” “global,” and intervening middle levels coexist, their interlocking influences be teased out, while reifying none as fixed or all-explanatory? The global scholarship sketched here suggests various answers, but collectively it introduces this wider scale as a key perspective among many – not to replace other views, such as that of national history, but to enrich and broaden their reach.
Obviously other disciplines are already pursuing their own crossings; the lines drawn here between five distinct “globes” are too stark. Tsing and Gluck’s Words in Motion is a good example, bringing together anthropologists, historians, and literary specialists to explore questions of translation, movement, and culture. Elkins’s seminars on world art history – to which speakers such as Fredric Jameson have been invited, intentionally infusing internal conversations with extradisciplinary perspectives – are another. From the perspective of world history, this essay’s brief journey through different visions of the globe aims to do something similar: to open pathways for fresh historical thinking. What would it mean to codesign classes with colleagues in literature? How would books on world history change if conceived around aesthetic categories of style? How can we, all of us, think more productively across lines of discipline as well as space and time?
Notes
1 Attempts by natural scientists to move in the other direction, addressing the concerns of disciplinary history, are less common: see Aunger (2007a; 2007b); or Gordon’s tongue-in-cheek “Colonial studies” (2010).
2 Each domain deserves its own essay. Consider the uses of “infographics” and global statistics to improve international development policy: www.gapminder.org/world (accessed Mar. 2012); or “world music” and musicological studies of the interactions between local and global motifs, performers, markets, and listeners (Tenzer 2006).
3 This may be partly the result of internal disciplinary conversations framed by discourses of “globalization” (see chapter above by Bright and Geyer), often in unapologetically presentist terms – a starting point toward which historians display a professionally visceral allergy. I exclude the disciplines of geography and sociology, which are already more “baked in” to world history. In this volume, for example, Simmons, McKeown, and Kramer draw heavily on geography, while Chase-Hall and Dunn offer a kind of sociological analysis, directly on display. Gerritsen’s chapter is one of several that rely on sociological theory – in her case, Roland Robertson’s idea of “glocalization” to depict interlocking scales (see Robertson 1990), and Mark Herkenrath’s related notions of divergence, convergence, and hybrid forms. Historical sociologists – from Janet Abu-Lughod (1991) to Charles Tilly (2006) and Immanuel Wallerstein (2004) – occupy more or less canonical status in world history, as do historical geographers such as Kären Wigen and Martin Lewis (1997).
4 A recent exception, attempting to merge economics with evolutionary psychology, is Frank (2011). More typically, Acemoglu and Robinson (2006; 2012), while positing a 500-year-plus time depth for their analysis, aim mostly to explain modern forms of state power (democracy, dictatorship) and contemporary economic issues (poverty, prosperity).
5 Specialists in other areas, such as Michael Shapiro in political theory, are also doing globally oriented work (see Der Derian and Shapiro 1989; Shapiro and Alker 1995). IR and CP also overlap the ostensibly interdisciplinary field of “international studies.”
6 The dividing line is not quite so stark: some political scientists mix these approaches. But in the discipline as a whole, quantitative work has become more prominent.
7 Phrase from Kalevi J. Holsti (1985: 103), cited by Cox and Nossal (2009: 287).
8 For a cross-disciplinary example, see van Schendel and Abraham (2005), which likewise questions the centrality of the state, calls for multiscalar perspective, and argues that border spaces are good places to see flows and fluidity.
9 Work in other anthropological fields also stretches across geographical space and deep into time – one might consider archaeologists or evolutionary/biological anthropologists such as Robin Fox (2011) or Robin Dunbar (2004). These subfields, which obviously do not use methods of participant observation, are more aligned with positivist approaches.
10 Patricia Greenfield, quoted by Brettell (2009: 655).
11 The anxieties focused on losing touch with real people and especially with subaltern subjects – and also about stretching ethnography too far into macro scales, thereby losing the flavor of fieldwork. For recent contributions, see Falzon (2009) or Coleman and von Hellermann (2011).
12 I leave aside here nontextual, and also nonliterary, mass-culture materials. “Art” is discussed further below, but otherwise these fall into the bailiwick of “cultural studies,” a sprawling interdisciplinary approach that has developed its own veins of global thinking. See Wilson and Connery (2007).
13 Comparative literature’s very name obviously suggests a deep link with comparative approaches generally, the trade-offs of which have already been well covered by the chapter by Michael Adas. As in anthropology or comparative politics, recent work in CL has also reflected on the blurring of units used for study. I will not re-cover either topic here.
14 As Damrosch notes (2003: 25), other approaches, descended from Frye, go in different directions. For example, Itamar Even-Zohar (1990) is a translation theorist who uses a “polysystems” approach to encompass all the world’s literature. Franco Moretti mapped the global spread of a literary form (the European novel), at a high level of abstraction, without any close readings of particular texts – and then (2005) issued a manifesto for an entirely “abstract” literary history. This amounts to methodological heresy in literary scholarship, akin to some world historians’ assertion that global history can be written with only secondary materials, rather than through recourse to primary documents.
15 To be fair, Damrosch notes (2003: 282) that comparatists returned the disregard, seeing their broader vision as tantamount to overcoming specialists’ scholarly pedantry and their nationalistically narrow linguistic training. Some even presented world literature as a chief hope for world peace and intercultural understanding. Parallels could be drawn with world history, in the rhetoric of its critics as well as some of its converts.
16 He notes that these texts will overlap – so the ellipses spread ever farther.
17 Think of historical intermediaries such as missionaries, merchants, notaries, as well as literal translators: Burns (2010).
18 Consider the Asterix series of comic books, which originated in French but have been translated into more than 100 global languages. Anthea Bell, their co-translator into English, has spoken about the challenge of recalibrating interwoven puns, songs, names, and pictures, see Bell (1999); also http://web.archive.org/web/20060327011137/http://www.literarytranslation.com/workshops/asterix/ (accessed Mar. 2012).
19 Crystal (2003: 4–5) notes that only a dozen or so countries use English as a “mother-tongue,” but the language nevertheless has a special status, often legally recognized, in about 70. In more than 100 countries, English is the most commonly taught foreign language.
20 Werner Friedrich criticized “world literature” as being, in practice, “NATO literatures.” Damrosch (2003: 110–113) admits a “dramatically uneven balance of literary trade,” similar to the situation in IR. In 1987, for instance, 1,500 translations of American books were published in Brazil – but only 14 Brazilian books appeared in English translation.
21 I leave aside the wider approach of “visual studies” – a broad interdisciplinary domain, with a relationship to art history similar to that of cultural studies to literature.
22 Elkins (2007: 3–4); he goes on to declare, “Far and away the most pressing problem facing the discipline is the prospect of world art history” (2007: 41).
23 See, for example, an online exhibit on globalization mounted by the Museum für Kommunikation, Frankfurt, at www.globalmuseum.de (accessed Mar. 2012).
24 See www.asia-europe.uni-heidelberg.de/en/research/cluster-professorships/global-art-history.html (accessed Mar. 2012).
25 Originally published in 2004, the review was reprinted in Elkins (2007: 42–71).
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