Peter Hitchcock

The resurgence of "world literature" as a category of study seems to coincide with what we understand as globalization, but how does postcolonial writing fit into this picture? Beyond the content of this novel or that, what elements of postcolonial fiction might challenge the assumption that its main aim is to circulate native information globally? The Long Space provides a fresh look at the importance of postcolonial writing by examining how it articulates history and place both in content and form. Not only does it offer a new theoretical model for understanding decolonization's impact on duration in writing, but through a series of case studies of Guyanese, Somali, Indonesian, and Algerian writers, it urges a more protracted engagement with time and space in postcolonial narrative. Although each writer—Wilson Harris, Nuruddin Farah, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, and Assia Djebar—explores a unique understanding of postcoloniality, each also makes a more general assertion about the difference of time and space in decolonization. Taken together, they herald a transnationalism beyond the contaminated coordinates of globalization as currently construed.

Transnationalism and Postcolonial Form

The Long Space

Can transnationalism be separated from capitalist globalization? Can an artist create cultural space and rethink the nation state simultaneously? In Imaginary States, Peter Hitchcock explores such questions to invigorate the analysis of cultural transnationalism. Juxtaposing the macroeconomic realities of commodities with the creation of cultural workers, Hitchcock offers case studies of Nike and the coffee industry alongside examinations of writings by the Algerian feminist Assia Djebar and the Caribbean writers Edward Glissant, Kamau Brathwaite, and Maryse Conde. The stark contrast of literary examples of cultural transnationalism with discussions of commodity circulation attempts to complicate the relationship between the aesthetic and the economic. Blocking our imagination, Hitchcock argues, is the desire to produce cultural diversity under the terms of a global economy. In believing that to have one we must pursue the other, we flatten difference, erase complexity, and fail to grasp the imaginaries at stake. Hitchcock's invocation of the imagination allows for a deeper understanding of transnational "states"--whether states of being, economic states, or nation states. Proffering that the crisis of globalization is a crisis of the imagination, he urges that cultural transnationalism not be feared or suppressed but approached as a way to imagine difference globally.

Studies in Cultural Transnationalism

Imaginary States

Jeffrey R. Di Leo

What are the theoretical parameters that produce the category public intellectual? By pondering the conceptual elements that inform the term, this book offers not just a political critique, but a sense of the new challenges its meanings present. This collection complicates the notion of public intellectual while arguing for its continued urgency in communities formal and informal, institutional and abstract. While it is not quite accurate to say public intellectuals have disappeared entirely, it is clear they function differently in an age of global neoliberalism and techno-digital overdrive. Today the idea of the public intellectual bears only the slightest resemblance to what it was fifty or even twenty-five years ago. The essays in this collection provide a number of different ways to imagine the fate of public intellectuals and offers a thorough exploration of the commonplace ideologies and politics associated with them.

Politics, Theory, and the Public Sphere

The New Public Intellectual

What keeps materialism moving? At a moment of crisis in materialism, in the wake of materialist practice once known as socialist revolution, this bold and innovative book presents oscillation as a metaphor for understanding materialism anew. Mindful of the dangers for materialism, Peter Hitchcock nevertheless shows how oscillation is part of the conceptual framework of materialist inquiry from Marx to the present. A reply to the call to rethink the material constraints on materialism itself, this book uses oscillation to refer simultaneously to movement within and between bodies of theory, within theories of the body, and within and between institutional spaces in which such theory is taken up. Hitchcock argues that oscillation augurs a politics that both shares the legacy of historical materialism and recognizes the critical edge of cultural materialism in its approach to the social practices of everyday life. In a series of ingenious readings, he rethinks the problem of ideology for Marx and his interpreters (Etienne Balibar in particular); provides a materialist intervention on the status of the body for theory; proposes an analysis of theories of space and the space of theory in the era of "cartographic anxiety"; sees the ghosts of materialism oscillating a good deal more wildly than Derrida would have it; offers a daring approach to shoes and fetishism within transnational capitalism; and concludes with a novel lesson on what the theremin, an electronic musical instrument based on oscillators, might teach us about the importance of sense perception for materialist thought. As both a descriptive device for the state of materialism and a critical tool within a polemic about whatmaterialism can do at this juncture, oscillation provides a brilliant key to materialist critique.

Peter Hitchcock

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