What is materialism’s material? Thoughts toward (actually against) a materialism for “world literature”

Abstract

Materialists in postcolonial literary studies can often tend to look past the literary material before them to the “material conditions” that seem the more urgent object of attention. This article argues that the materialist’s gaze should be fixed on the literary surface, not as a kind of code for an external material world, but as itself the material profile of the lived experience of need. To this end, the article introduces the concept of “the material” as it appears in the aesthetics of Theodor Adorno. It then considers the literary critical essays of Kamau Brathwaite as exemplary of a decolonizing materialist criticism. The argument is framed by the consideration of the re-emergence of “world literature” as a disciplinary framework.

Keywords:

• materialism
• world literature
• Theodor Adorno
• das Material
• Kamau Brathwaite
• nation language

Notes

1. As will be seen, this is distinct from asking whether or not postcolonial studies should be concerned with the literariness of literature. This has been done lucidly by Eli Park Sorensen in his recent Postcolonial Studies and the Literary.

2. Raymond Williams has pointed out in Marxism and Literature (97–98) the shortcomings of notions of mediation that imply an original substance and a secondary mediating sponge. Adorno frequently uses “sedimented in” as a synonym for “mediated by” as this registers the presence of one material in another.

3. “Pentameter” is here shorthand for the tradition of English metrics in which pentameter has been dominant.