Social Movements, Literature and the Specters of Empire

Jeffrey Lawrence's bravura essay "Mobilizing Literature" earned my immediate sympathy in its opening diagnosis of a certain — one may say dominant — methodological binary.1 Lawrence lucidly identifies the dominance of Jamesonian materialist formalism and post-McGurl institutionalist sociology, which in turn provides a perspicacious departing point for his attempt to reinscribe the social movement as a hermeneutic category in literary studies. I am in agreement with an idea that Lawrence does not fully spell out but clearly implies: both proponents and detractors of these paradigms understand them as political criticism without questioning the axiomatic claim to politicization that underlies them.

Lawrence successfully punctures this broad assumption by noting that these methods often obscure actual relationships between literature and politics. Pace Lawrence one can conclude that the Jameson-McGurl-influenced cartography of US literature entails a sublimation of complex political and sociological dynamics into a reified account of literary form, sometimes guilty of the kind of reflectionism that their work sought to uproot. I am perhaps overplaying Lawrence's intention. After all, his account of the relationship between social movements and literary production does not wean itself completely from the English field's addiction to allegorical reading. Even so, Lawrence's exciting provocations emerge from the claim that social movements produce epistemological breaks that cannot be reduced to institutional paradigm-changes and that fault lines and climates of crisis cannot be forced into established modes of allegorization or critique.

And yet, as someone who has attentively read Lawrence's work for some time, I was struck to find in the essay an Americanist turn that in some ways undoes his rich work on

transnational and hemispheric configurations of US literature. "Mobilizing Literature" embraces a US-centric critical praxis invested in case studies — n+1, Octavia Butler — that, at first sight, appear more or less unrelated to the continental approach of his previous work. I do think that Lawrence's critique of the dominant strains of English-department criticism is possible in part because of his moonlighting as a Latin Americanist. An attentive reader of García Márquez, Borges, and Bolaño, Lawrence can see how metaliterature undoes allegory and the centrality of epistemological breaks in major literary turns. His reading of Octavia Butler vis-á-vis what he calls "alternative communities" and "the limitations of Black freedom struggles" echoes some of the richest moments of his scholarship.

Ultimately, though, "Mobilizing Literature" points to an investment in the US literary field that brackets his rich conception of the literature of the Americas as "a set of overlapping literary fields that are at once regional, national, and hemispheric."2 Significant limitations to the claims of "Mobilizing Literature" stem from this heuristic decision.

US literature and criticism as construed by Lawrence's arguments are doubly haunted by the world and by empire. His reading of Jameson points in this direction. Lawrence provocatively identifies in Jameson's account of postmodernism a translation imperii that shifts his literary corpus from a primarily European set of modernists to a group of postmodern writers mostly from the United States. More significantly, Lawrence claims that Jameson "offered a formally sophisticated and anti-essentialist reading framework for reading US authors and works in relation to an international system" at a time when US "critics were rapidly turning toward the transnational methods that would proliferate in the early 2000s." Lawrence generously concludes that materialist critics "have largely adhered to [Jameson's] geocultural framing of 'American' literary culture as a concentrated national expression of the global economic system."

Jameson, a critic who developed his influential work in departments other than English, often models US-centric criticism that rarely concerns itself with non-US cultural production. The "national expression of the global literary system" idea became an alibi for a provincialism able to make grand claims about global objects — capitalism, the novel — without exceeding the boundaries of the US or the monolingualism of the Anglosphere. One could also say that McGurl's influence derives in part from his focus on a US-specific phenomenon, the MFA, fostering a sociology of literature that often elides the globalization of literary infrastructures.

This is to say that "Mobilizing Literature" accepts a reterritorialization of US-centrism by understanding twenty-first-century US social movements as national variations of global dynamics. A consequence of this reterritorialization is that Lawrence's challenge to the methodological impasses described in the first section of the essay is more compelling than his subsequent and underwhelmingly localized examples like n+1. Occupy Wall Street has led to a financial reorientation in literature with an aesthetics not reducible to this locality — think for example of Hernan Diaz's Trust, a novel unreadable without its gestures towards the Borgesian.

"Mobilizing Literature" would be stronger if Lawrence weaved in transnationalism, as he has so elegantly done elsewhere. Falling into the same retrenchment of a national, almost monadic, US literature weakens his bold critique of the Jameson-McGurl paradigm. The challenge of deprovincializing US studies did not end with the so-called global turns of the early 2000s. Scholars like Patricia Stuelke and Sarah Quesada have shown that a social movement-oriented understanding of literature unequivocally requires both an account of empire and an account of the South-South ties of minoritized and migrant literatures. It may be that the case studies of n+1 and Octavia Butler, undoubtedly central to contemporary US literature, nevertheless hinder the ability to see the global designs behind US social movements.

Transnationalism is the missing perspective that would turn Lawrence's movement-based framework into a model that effectively defies the dominant accounts of US literature in the English-department sphere. Those of us frustrated with the unending monolingualism and provincialism of Anglocentric and US-centric criticism have been waiting for, and working toward, such a defiance. I consider Jeffrey Lawrence a comrade in this struggle.

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Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado is the Jarvis Thurston and Mona Van Duyn Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of seven books, including Naciones intelectuales: Las fundaciones de la modernidad literaria mexicana (1917-1959) (2009, Winner of the LASA Mexico 2010 Book Award), Screening Neoliberalism: Mexican Cinema 1988-2012 (2014), Strategic Occidentalism: On Mexican Fiction, The Neoliberal Book Market and the Question of World Literature (2018), and Intermitencias alfonsinas: Estudios y otros textos (2019). Sánchez Prado is the editor of the Critical Mexican Studies book series at Vanderbilt University Press, and with Leslie March, the co-editor of the SUNY Series in Latin American Cinema.

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