Poetics and the geopolitics of knowledge: From colonial to global

ABSTRACT

This article examines the critical operation proposed in the “Diaspolinks” project (supported by a number of institutions including the University of Edinburgh), and attempts to assess its original contribution, and the general conditions for critique, in the context of the globalized epistemic regime now governing contemporary academia. The concern is the praxis of scholarship required if a new modality of critique is to be re-imagined – especially in the case of the humanities, largely singled out for devitalization in the global university. The study argues for a powerful rehistoricization of “literature”, one of the humanities’ key objects, and helps to develop a new critical edge to the “normal science” of literary study, including the dominant paradigm of postcolonial studies. Taking its cue from the translational quality of colonial history, the argument suggests a comparative critique of postcolonial theory, and a reassessment of the prevalent analysis of power which postcolonial studies have provided in the humanities since the 1980s.

KEYWORDS:

• Poetics
• globalization
• cognitive capitalism
• literary studies
• modern languages
• transcolonial

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In the course of the 1980s, the Thatcherian slogan “There is no alternative” came to encapsulate the ideological outlook of free-market neo-liberalism. It is mostly its denunciation by opponents which brought the acronym TINA into usage.

2. “The modern spirit is vivisective. Vivisection is itself the most modern process one can conceive”, he writes in Stephen Hero (Joyce [1944] 1956, 186). It is worth clarifying here: in Joyce’s translinguistic modernism, as in most modernist literature in the anglophone sphere, the term “modern” carries a poetics which precisely reverses and fractures the meaning attached to “modernity” in the ideologies of progress and colonial capitalist development. Joyce flees the semi-colonial setting of Ireland to settle in multicultural Trieste, and explicitly escape the grip of history: history “is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake”, Stephen Dedalus says in Ulysses (Joyce 1961, 34).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Claire Joubert

Claire Joubert, professor of English and comparative literature at Université Paris 8 and director of the interdisciplinary research programme “Poétique de l’étranger”, conducts research on the theoretical and political effects of the diversity of languages, exploring the critical issues raised by linguistic difference in the history of discourses on language, literature and culture. She has published on the epistemology of comparativism (Comparer l’étranger. Enjeux du comparatisme en littérature, co-edited with E. Baneth-Nouailhetas, 2006); the poetics of multilingualism (Samuel Beckett et le théâtre de l’étranger, co-edited with A. Bernadet, 2008); and on postcoloniality and translation. Her recent work has engaged Indian literary history (Problèmes d’histoire littéraire indienne, co-edited with L. Zecchini, Revue de littérature comparée, special issue, October–December, 2015), the genealogy of global studies, the history of Black globalities, and the contemporary stakes of orientalism and Muslim globalities. Her most recent publication is Penser la différence culturelle du colonial au mondial: une anthologie transculturelle (2019).