The Literary History of World‐Systems, I: Marxist Lineages

This essay is the first of a two‐part series on the use of world‐systems theory in literary studies. It argues that the recent popularity of world‐systems theory among literary scholars has raised important questions about how we practice literary history. Appeals to a more “global” configuration of world literary space seem to promise a more inclusive literary history, but world‐systems theory's expansive focus also clashes with literary studies' traditional definitions of cultural activity. In order to investigate this tension, the essay begins by examining the birth of world‐systems theory. It shows how world‐systems theory grew out of a number of intersecting currents in academic scholarship, including Marxist economics, dependista theory, and Annales historiography. The essay then proceeds to trace literary studies' earliest engagements with world‐systems theory. As I show, these initial engagements took place within two distinct critical traditions: (1) in the Subaltern Studies project, which diagnosed intellectual production as an effect of the global division of labor; and (2) in Jamesonian Marxism, which attempted to map literature onto the world‐system under the aegis of a leftist Hegelianism. The essay concludes by analyzing how these projects have helped to redefine the nature of the relationship between literary production and economic systems.