Scale, and its application, have occupied literary scholarship and particularly the category of World Literature over the last few decades, and have been divisive issues in this field. Perhaps it is because of such a divisive character that World Literature has been the site of many productive debates about which literatures can be compared and why some have resisted such comparisons in the past. While scholars like David Damrosch1 and Pascale Casanova2 have explored how literary analysis is affected by a shift in its site from the nation to the world, their analyses have often traced this shift from Europe outwards to the rest of the world. More recent work by Nirvana Tanoukhi and Oded Nir situates such scalar issues within the context of globalization, claiming that the need to map possibilities of representation has become more acute during our times.3 Work of the latter kind has been crucial in allowing a conception of a literary modernity that is singular — connected across national lines that are often too narrow to contain the frequently international influences upon constituent works of world literature.

Auritro Majumder’s recent book, Insurgent Imaginations: World Literature and the Periphery offers a possible way out of such false binaries of the universal and the particular through his novel concept of “peripheral internationalism.” Majumder’s take on this subject is refreshing in its defense of internationalist forms of resistance without overlooking the specific local literary and cinematic histories of his archives. He looks for these moments of opposition to different forms of capitalism, including imperialism, not in the future but in past examples of such cross-cultural collaborations. Most importantly, he excavates such instances in spaces designated as peripheral to global capital through “texts [that] forge the foundations, arguably, for a tradition of world literature that provincializes the ‘West’” (12). Drawing on Timothy Brennan’s reading of Giambattista Vico and Hegel, Insurgent Imaginations calls for a processive conception of the aesthetic — one that enables us to see World Literature as the product of labor, “labor understood, expansively, in the Hegelian sense of the term, as intentional, purposive human activity” (2). Such aesthetic labor, performed often as a part of struggles against repressive authority, allows for the imagining of social and political change.

The debt to Vico is evident in the title as the analysis hinges not on the specific moments of resistance but on the imagined forms of internationalist resistance available in fictional and non-fictional writings of the twentieth century. Majumder’s argument situates his archives in this humanist tradition traceable to Vico, Hegel, and Marx, counterposing imagination to the profusion of data that is currently available to us. Rather than focusing on the fixed and finished nature of such data, imagined forms of resistance in the aesthetic sphere map the unfolding of events and possibilities. Majumder’s main claim is based on this processual understanding of imagination as he argues that literary form itself facilitates an understanding of the social relations that animate history and make political changes possible. Research on World Literature has, in recent years, evinced a justified interest in the evolution of forms, most notably in Pheng Cheah’s What is a World? where he argues for a return of historical readings that question the central concept of the world, or its formation (“worlding”). Majumder draws on such work as Cheah’s along with other scholarly traditions that have unearthed histories from below such as the Subaltern Studies group. His work is, however, distinguished from the latter by its ability to see the local as an entity that is intertwined with the international. In a turn reminiscent of Nancy Fraser’s transnationalization of the Habermasian public sphere, Insurgent Imaginations calls for the internationalization of local, and often vernacular histories. Again, it is the formation of a world through forms, including literary forms, that allows Majumder to make a claim for re-reading World Literature through neglected already-international peripheral literatures.

Majumder points out how peripheral attempts at understanding and challenging imperialism shapes global history through cross-cultural connections and solidarities which are often self-evident enough not even to be mentioned explicitly. In a list of archives ranging from non-fiction writings by M.N. Roy, the twentieth-century Indian revolutionary leader, to Aravind Adiga’s contemporary Indian Anglophone novel, The White Tiger (2008), Majumder traces a history of such solidarities that have gone unnoticed. Insurgent Imaginations, however, goes beyond a mere collection of references to such solidarities (a valuable contribution in itself). Majumder reads an internationalist import in literary forms developed by Bengali writers such as the playwright Utpal Dutt, and the novelist and short-story writer, Mahasweta Devi, arguing that literary form operates in their works “as concrete embodiments of historical conjunctures and simultaneously as examples of resistance to the reification of historical teleology” (120). Such histories are not merely inserted into a larger pre-existing history that is then assigned primacy, the accusation that has often been levelled against such historiographic attempts. According to such criticism, the subsumption of smaller sub-national and national narratives to the metanarrative of capital neglects the untranslatable cultural differences among constituents of World Literature. Insurgent Imaginations rejects this false binary of the local and the universal, citing literary form as a means through which each produces the other.

In suggesting that current scholarly impasses may have their answers in re-readings of the past, Insurgent Imaginations locates the multiple crossings of form that have animated leftist writing of the twentieth century and beyond, in both fiction and non-fiction. Majumder finds answers to the confusion between the local and the universal in a period when the two were not separated as strictly as they are at present. The work begins with a discussion of two seemingly unconnected figures from world history — the Bengali writer and Nobel laureate, Rabindranath Tagore, and Mao Zedong, and the cross-cultural interactions brought about by the contemporaneity of Indian Independence (1947) and the Chinese Revolution (1949). Such connections are further explored in subsequent chapters and the scope of the work is expanded to include Latin American Cinema Novo and figures from American labor and racial justice movements. Majumder sees in the work of Mrinal Sen the influence of Cinema Novo directors such as Cuban Julio Garcia Espinosa and the Argentinians Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino alongside more local inspirations from Bengali writers such as Jibanananda Das and Manik Bandopadhyay. Such influences are also not straightforward and form networks that are often difficult to unravel for the contemporary viewer: the Bengali dramaturge Utpal Dutt’s street theater, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Kamiriithu experiments, and the revolutionary model plays of the Chinese Cultural Revolution are connected not merely by their near-simultaneous productions but also by their desire to create literary mediations under similar economic conditions. Such networks connect such works to an earlier Brechtian tradition and in the case of Dutt, also draws on 1960s collaborations between Indians and African Americans, as seen in his stage adaptation of the Scottsboro case, Manusher Adhikarey (1968). Tagore’s vision of visva-sahitya (World Literature) offers not merely a means of linking literatures from the periphery but also a method for understanding those attempts at universal humanism that trace their origins to the periphery. It is such a process of unraveling international connections that Insurgent Imaginations calls for, particularly by recuperating models of peripheral literatures such as the one offered by Tagore.

Referring to the Brazilian critic Ismail Xavier’s evocative phrase, “allegories of underdevelopment” (85), Majumder argues that a reexamination of earlier works of literature and film as allegories allows us not to move past the local. Rather, such works reveal “not the existence of an ideal reality transcending individuals and circumstances, but how these latter are surfeit with overarching yet invisible universals” (85-86). Works of visva-sahityaare thus, not just universals disguised as the local but attempts at realizing the universal immanent in the local. This offers a way of (if not a way out of) addressing the impasse that current scholarship on World Literature often finds itself mired in, oscillating between celebrations of difference and quests for representational models suited to global capitalism. Majumder’s focus on works of vernacular Bengali literature allows for an examination of the always-already international nature of the peripheral. Such analyses of the international have much in common with Nick Couldry’s assessment of the transnational, which he points out is always embedded in the local, rendering any strict separation between the two fallacious. Couldry suggests that apart from the theoretical validity of such a position, the practical possibilities of local resistances (that acknowledge their transnational character) necessitate more studies such as the one Majumder undertakes.4 Discussions of Devi’s acclaimed short story, “Draupadi,” for instance, take into account both the ways in which she has been decontextualized in the Anglo-American academy as a global writer, as well as Devi’s own methods of “negotiating demotic contestations over the world” (121) Majumder painstakingly situates Devi’s work in traditions of Bengali literature, but this does not prevent the analysis from seeing the “emerging contours of a horizontal solidarity” in the work (130). On the contrary, it is by seeing international pressures that are intrinsic to the local, that he offers a fuller picture of Devi’s work.

Similar pressures are an integral part of the work of a writer like Arundhati Roy, who, as the author of the Booker Prize-winning novel The God of Small Things (1997), is an even more celebrated global literary figure than Devi. Majumder focuses on Roy’s non-fiction, pointing out the narrative element in such works, specifically in Walking with the Comrades (2011), her essay on the Naxalite movement led by the Adivasis (indigenous communities) in India that has largely gone unnoticed. The choice of a piece of journalistic writing is an interesting one, as it allows Majumder to tease out the nuances of Roy’s own narrative persona as a character within her essay. This carefully cultivated persona enables Roy to leverage her own celebrity to mock liberal pretensions to solidarity with those on the margins. It simultaneously offers an opportunity to understand the traditions of journalistic writing into which Roy falls into – much like with Devi and her literary predecessors, Majumder is careful to situate Roy in a longer history of Indian journalistic writing that includes Satnam’s Jangalnama: Travels in a Maoist Guerrilla Zone and D. Markandeya’s Jaitrayatra (victorious journey). Both works detail insurgent movements in the Indian hinterland while tracing the source of their inspiration to similar twentieth-century movements across the global periphery. Roy’s work is thus not unique, but forms part of a larger corpus that interrogates those forms of imperialism that joins Adivasis with “Vietnam, the US empire, the Cold War, and pan-Africanist Black struggle” (157).

Not all forms of peripheral internationalism offer modes of anti-capitalist resistance, though. Aravind Adiga’s novel, The White Tiger, offers an example of how strategies and theoretical contributions of the Left are often appropriated to generate consent for neoliberal strategies, by the Right, or rather, a group that activist and author Tariq Ali calls the “extreme centre.” Ali points out that the emergence of such a dogmatic center has led to the adoption of “middle-of-the-road policies” at the expense of radical solutions, even when faced with abject poverty and man-made environmental apocalypse.5 While Adiga does offer strategies for understanding contemporary Indian reality beyond trite confrontations between the universal and the particular, Majumder argues that the novel’s denouement devolves into an endorsement of the “freedoms” bestowed by neoliberal policies. What the plot fails to accomplish, however, the form of the novel retains — animated by “formal principles of discrepancy and incongruity” (174), it foregrounds “the overarching problematic of uneven development of social form” in India (178).

Such a reading retains the project’s emphasis on developing newer scales of analysis for world literature and also advances the recently renewed interest in Leon Trotsky’s theory of combined and uneven development among literary scholars. Such an interest has depended as much on the work of Neil Smith and Doreen Massey in Geography as it has on Justin Rosenberg’s work in International Relations, among other contributions. In literary theory, the reemergence of Trotsky owes much to the Warwick Research Collective, which defines world literature “as the literature of the world-system — of the modern capitalist world-system, that is.”6 Much like Majumder, the collective also conceptualizes world literature through unevenness, eschewing false binaries of the local and the universal. While Majumder does mention the collective, one wishes that he had engaged at a deeper level with its work, especially since the specific socio-economic events that underwrite the works of world literature and film are not always immediately apparent. This is, in a sense, understandable since Majumder’s focus remains on how literary works can map the cognitive and the affective dimensions of uneven development that is a feature, rather than a flaw of global capitalism. Insurgent Imaginations explores how such unevenness is allegorized by writers and filmmakers from the periphery, suggesting that it is not specific moments like Bandung alone that matter but also imagined solidarities that develop on the peripheries that are not always as clearly definable. Such solidarities do, however, offer the utopian possibility of tracing the processes through which global capitalism operates. As one is faced with the difficult yet necessary task of imagining such moments of collective resistance that resist being rerouted into capitalist networks, Majumder posits twentieth century literary activism as a repository of international encounters that demonstrates the possibilities of an insurgent imagination.

The book’s contribution, in the final analysis, is to our current understandings of World Literature, which has too often in the academy come to signify a collection of disparate non-Western national literatures rather than a heuristic. Insurgent Imaginations seeks to reclaim World Literature from such narrow definitions and position it against fixed groupings of literatures and canons, arguing that it should consist of the intertextual linkages between constituents that are in a constate state of flux. World Literature thus becomes an opportunity to reclaim the unnoticed and buried connections between the literatures of the third world, a space that Majumder admits is an abstraction, albeit only in relation to capital. The book thus allows readers to reevaluate literary works and scholarly debates of the past (notably the Fredric Jameson-Aijaz Ahmad debate in a fascinating analysis), while insisting on viewing such works through the collective challenges they posed to imperialism.

1. David Damrosch, What is World Literature? (Princeton UP, 2003).
2. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, Trans. M.B. DeBevoise (Harvard UP, 2004).
3. Nirvana Tanoukhi, “The Scale of World Literature,” New Literary History, 39.3 (2008): 599-617. And Oded Nir, “World Literature as a Problem of Scale,” Scale in Literature and Culture, Eds. M. Tavel Clarke and D. Wittenberg (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
4. Nick Couldry, “What and Where is the Transnationalized Public Sphere?,” Transnationalizing the Public Sphere, Ed. Kate Nash (Polity Press, 2014).
5. Tariq Ali, The Extreme Centre (Verso, 2015).
6. Warwick Research Collective, Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature. (Liverpool UP, 2015).