Immanuel Wallerstein and the Problem of the World: System, Scale, Culture - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822348489 ISBN 13: 9780822348481

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

In this collection of essays, leading cultural theorists consider the meaning and implications of world-scale humanist scholarship by engaging with Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis. The renowned sociologist developed his influential critical framework to explain the historical and continuing exploitation of the rest of the world by the West. World-systems analysis reflects Wallerstein’s conviction that understanding global inequality requires thinking on a global scale. Humanists have often criticized his theory as insufficiently attentive to values and objects of knowledge such as culture, agency, difference, subjectivity, and the local. The editors of this collection do not deny the validity of those criticisms; instead, they offer Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis as a well-developed vision of the world scale for humanists to think with and against. Scholars of comparative literature, gender, geography, history, law, race, and sociology consider what thinking on the world scale might mean for particular disciplinary practices, knowledge formations, and objects of study. Several essays offer broader reflections on what is at stake for the study of culture in decisions to adopt or reject world-scale thinking. In a brief essay, Immanuel Wallerstein situates world-systems analysis vis-à-vis the humanities.

Contributors. Gopal Balakrishnan, Tani E. Barlow, Neil Brenner, Richard E. Lee, Franco Moretti, David Palumbo-Liu, Bruce Robbins, Helen Stacy, Nirvana Tanoukhi, Immanuel Wallerstein, Kären Wigen

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David Palumbo-Liu is Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University.

Bruce Robbins is the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University.

Nirvana Tanoukhi received her doctorate in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University. She has held fellowships at the Humanities Center and the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, both at Harvard University.

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Immanuel Wallerstein and the Problem of the World

SYSTEM, SCALE, CULTURE

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2011 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4848-1

Contents

Acknowledgments..........................................................................................................................viiIntroduction: The Most Important Thing Happening.........................................................................................1Richard E. Lee ? The Modern World-System: Its Structures, Its Geoculture, Its Crisis and Transformation.............................27Bruce Robbins ? Blaming the System..................................................................................................41Franco Moretti ? World-Systems Analysis, Evolutionary Theory, Weltliteratur.........................................................67Nirvana Tanoukhi ? The Scale of World Literature....................................................................................78Neil Brenner ? The Space of the World: Beyond State-Centrism?.......................................................................101Kären Wigen ? Cartographies of Connection: Ocean Maps as Metaphors for Inter-Area History......................................138Tani E. Barlow ? What Is a Poem?: The Event of Women and the Modern Girl as Problems in Global or World History.....................155Helen Stacy ? The Legal System of International Rights..............................................................................187David Palumbo-Liu ? Rationality and World-Systems Analysis: Fanon and the Impact of the Ethico-Historical...........................202Immanuel Wallerstein ? Thinking about the "Humanities"..............................................................................223Gopal Balakrishnan ? The Twilight of Capital?.......................................................................................227Bibliography.............................................................................................................................233Contributors.............................................................................................................................249Index....................................................................................................................................251

Chapter One

The Modern World-System Its Structures, Its Geoculture, Its Crisis and Transformation RICHARD E. LEE

World-systems analysis emerged in the 1970s, closely related to the medium-term decline of the world economic expansion that had been operative over the preceding quarter century and the end of the period of hegemony in the interstate system over the same period, which had been marked by the post–Second World War dominance of the United States. On the one hand, world-systems analysis was a product of the system that it sought to understand. On the other hand, it was a protest or resistance movement within the structures of knowledge—in articulation with the social movements associated with the upheavals of 1968—to the ways the world and its functioning had been portrayed, and thus it framed what actions, and in whose interests, were deemed possible and legitimate. As an outgrowth of the processes reproducing historical capitalism in the long term and their secular crisis, world-systems analysis has been and is a forward-looking movement during the contemporary period of crisis, and arguably transition.

The basic premise of world-systems analysis is that historical social systems have lives. They come into being as a unique and indivisible set of singular, longue durée structures. The processes of reproduction of these structures exhibit secular trends and cyclical rhythms that may be observed over the life of the system. Eventually, however, these processes run up against asymptotes, or limitations, in overcoming the contradictions of the system and the system ceases to exist. The structures of the modern world-system, or capitalist world-economy, emerged in Europe at the beginning of the long sixteenth century, the period known as the transition from feudalism to capitalism. By the end of the Hundred Years' War, an axial division of labor was developing between a western European core where high-wage, skilled workers produced low-bulk, high value-added manufactures, and an eastern European periphery where high-bulk, low value-added necessities were produced by a lower cost work force. The long-distance trade in these commodities resulted in the accumulation (concentration and centralization) of capital in the core.

The processes reproducing this relationship over the long term—the "accumulation of accumulation" or profit making for reinvestment and thus more profit making—underwent periodic fluctuations. The expansion of the system to incorporate new pools of low-cost labor provided the solutions that turned periods of world economic downturn into periods of upturn. A principal characteristic of the world today is that there no longer exist significant pools of labor outside the system to be incorporated at the bottom of the wage hierarchy to take the place of previously incorporated workers who have militated for and succeeded in negotiating higher remuneration. The result constitutes a challenge to capital in maintaining the world-scale rate of profit.

The "endless" accumulation resulting from the extraction and appropriation of surplus produced by labor could only take place within the context of what developed as an interstate system. Unlike "parcellized sovereignty" (the overlapping geographic jurisdictions of feudal "realms") the multiple states of which this new system was composed were formally "sovereign," with reciprocal rights and obligations, at least to the extent that their territorial extensions, and the monopoly on the use of force within them, were recognized by other states. Fluctuating flows of goods, capital, and labor could thus be controlled across semi-permeable borders throughout the system. In practice, strong states worked to loosen controls during periods of world economic upturn and tighten controls during periods of downturn to favor accumulation (along with its concentration and centralization) and contain and defuse class conflict.

Like its economic processes, the geopolitics of this system also underwent periodic fluctuations. Competition among elites resulted in "world wars," the outcomes of which were short-lived states of "hegemony," a status of the system (not an attribute of a single state) during which one strong state exercised military, commercial, financial, and cultural ascendancy, before other parts of the world-system "caught up" to become once more competitive and the cycle repeated. Three such periods may be observed: the period of Dutch hegemony after the Thirty Years' War, the period of British hegemony following the French Revolutionary/Napoleonic Wars, and the most recent, the period of U.S. hegemony after the thirty-years-long First-Second World War. Significantly, over the past five hundred years, no power has been able to totally dominate the system and thus to turn it into a world-empire and today no seemingly credible scenario for establishing a new state of hegemony has emerged.

There was a third set of structures that were just as constitutive of the modern world-system as those in the arenas of production and distribution (the economic), and coercion and decision-making (the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822348489
• ISBN 13: 9780822348481
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Herausgeber: Palumbo-Liu
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland