The Ends of Entanglement: Conjectures on a Future Politics for Global Anglophone Literature

During the rapidly globalizing 1990s a term used in quantum physics to describe "spooky relations" between particles "at a distance" made its way into the humanities, where it was adapted to describe the interconnection of people, places, and things across economic and social space.1 The word was entanglement. In its home discipline entanglement names an integral yet mysterious interconnection between particles. Yet "entanglement doesn't "mean just any old kind of connection, interweaving, or enmeshment in a complicated situation," Karen Barad explains.2 "To be entangled," rather, "is . . . to lack an independent, self-contained existence."3 For physicists, then, entanglement is less a description of an untraceable or "spooky" connection than it is a metaphor for the state of being inextricably and uncontrollably connected. For humanists and social scientists at the end of the Cold War, the principle of inextricable connection became increasingly salient.

As it migrated from the "spooky" world of physics into the humanities, the entanglement metaphor lent coherence to an emergent object of study called global literature or the literature of globalization. The metaphor has been pivotal in the field at least since Susie O'Brien and Imre Szeman's influential introduction to a 2001 special issue of The South Atlantic Quarterly, where they considered the existence of a "fundamental entanglement between literature and the phenomena most commonly associated with globalization," most importantly the histories of "imperialism and colonialism" from "the time of Columbus to the present" and the related "global spread of capitalism."4 O'Brien and Szeman's modification of the metaphor as a "fundamental entanglement" underscored their objective — and many after them — to frame a literature defined by (and itself helping define) an irreversible global connectivity.

In 2001, O'Brien and Szeman still saw a field devoted to the "fundamental entanglement" of literature and globalization as aspirational. More recently, though, the consolidation of the Global Anglophone as a teachable and hirable field confirms its scholarly and institutional realization. This realization is acutely born out, for instance, in Debjani Ganguly's recent and seminal work in the field, This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form (2016). The cover of Ganguly's book features a globular mass that would seem to represent what she will go on to theorize in the book, brilliantly and at length, as a "global entanglement." The language of entanglement is axiomatic for Ganguly. She describes the historical present as "the entanglement of humanitarianism, sovereignty, and security";5 she lauds emergent aesthetic forms for their ability to "capture the depth . . . of our global entanglements"; 6 she seeks out aesthetic forms that can compass the "hell of violently entangled world histories"; 7 and she finds these forms in the works of towering Anglophone writers like Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Joe Sacco, David Mitchell, and Don DeLillo. Ganguly's work is illustrative of a current in literary studies today, and in the humanities at large, which repeatedly turns to the entanglement metaphor to theorize the world as an interconnected yet largely un-mappable whole. Figured in this way, the global contemporary is depicted as a totality so densely striated with the crossing and interweaving between economic center and periphery, humans and nature, subject and object, real and virtual, empire and post-colony, past and present, that the constitutive partitions of modernity no longer hold. 8 The snarled globe on the cover of Ganguly's book gestures towards the materialization of this entangled predicament.

If everything that now goes global appears to entangle, it has not always been so. Very recently, the world and its literatures appeared more orderly and navigable, full of "global flows," nodes, and networks.9 Today, though, entanglement has become a dominant and almost crypto-normative figure for capturing the world in its utmost complexity. My position is that a critical reliance on the entanglement metaphor is in danger of hindering rather than enabling a politics of Global Anglophone literatures, a politics that would make it into a field that does more than reify or recapitulate what Ganguly calls the "conundrum of the hyperconnected . . . world order."10 As I argue below, the passage of entanglement into our literary critical vocabulary has had the welcome the effect of tying the "global" to empire and colonial power. On the way, however, too much of the old political purview has been lost in the tangle. What is perhaps most striking when one traces the development of the metaphor in the humanities is the way that it works to restrict agency, sight, command, and "mastery" over the world, and thus also narrow possibilities for planned structural change or transformation.11 As the entanglement metaphor becomes talismanic it raises connectivity itself to the level of the sublime, alibiing a forfeiture of interpretation and political judgement where it might be needed most.

The Writing of Entanglement: Two Theses

The assimilation of entanglement as a keyword in the humanities has generated at least two theses that are central to the current institutional and critical currency of Global Anglophone literature. First, the colonialism as entanglement thesis; second, and the postcolonial entanglement thesis. The colonialism as entanglement thesis holds that while Western colonial power and empire set out to construct an orderly world of categorical distinctions — of race, gender, class, caste, or species, for instance — it ultimately failed.12 Instead, imperial endeavors engendered what Carolyn Hamilton calls a "complex historical entanglement of indigenous and colonial concepts." 13 This thesis runs through much of what is lately valued and taught in Global Anglophone fiction, especially in the historical novel.

Consider David Malouf's Remembering Babylon (1993), winner of the inaugural IMPAC Dublin Award for literature written or translated into English.14 Published right at the moment that scholars of colonialism began turning to the entanglement metaphor, Malouf's novel upturns the possibility of strict racial and cultural divides in the contact zone of the nineteenth-century Australian frontier.15 Tracing the life of Gemma Fairley, an English deck hand thrown overboard off the remote coast of Northwest Australia and raised by aborigines, the novel begins with Gemmy's traumatic return to European settler society, as he crosses the boundary into the white settlement and stammers (with the few words of English he can recall) that he is a "B-b-British object," Gemmy's malapropism — mistaking object for subject — inaugurates the novel's wider staging of multiple, overlapping interpenetrations of humans and nature, subject and object, colonized and colonizer, dream and waking.16 One reads the novel subsumed within the consciousness of anxious settlers as they apprehend how irreversibly their lives are enmeshed with the land and the indigenous peoples around them. Malouf's Remembering Babylon is to the settler narrative what Amitav Ghosh's Ibis Trilogy is to the novel of global imperial networks — a highly lauded effort to use the affordances of the novel to de-partition the hierarchies of empire and capitalist modernity. Whereas Malouf's contact zone is the Australian frontier, though, Ghosh's is the sea and the ship. His colonial entanglements are gleaned in the hybridity of the lascar language, in the delicate equilibrium of international trade in silver, tea, opium, and in the multiple threads of ecological thought that animate the trilogy. For both Ghosh and Malouf, the control of imperial actors over the colonized world breaks down in the process of enacting colonial rule itself. In their novels, empire and colonial power appear more fluid than hierarchical, more tangled than ordered, a series of fold and turns rather than straight lines and plotted courses.

Meanwhile, a parallel theory of postcolonial entanglement also lends value and coherence to the Global Anglophone as a field. For proponents of this thesis, such as Mary Louise Pratt, formal imperialism had successfully enforced "categorical distinctions," and it was only as "colonial power breaks down . . . [that] entanglements . . . [had] come into play." 17 Entanglement is not the condition of colonialism but rather of the "neocolony" and of globalized present. Achille Mbembe agrees, advising that studies of the postcolony in particular turn to the "context of displacement and entanglement." 18 On this view, the end of formal empire gave way to a new form of power that no longer ruled through "stark distinctions" but instead through irreversible economic, military, and cultural connections. Limning these connections is clearly seen as an important objective for the contemporary Global Anglophone novelist. This task is plain, for instance, in the works addressed by Ganguly — by Rushdie, Amis, or Sacco — or in Zia Haider Rahman's critically acclaimed In the Light of What We Know (2014), which shuttles between American and European stock floors and Kabul's Green Zone in order to stage the symmetry of global finance and military action in the old enclaves of imperial interest.19 Rahman's narrative of spatial connectivity is further temporalized in a work like Kamila Shamsie's Burnt Shadows (2009), which follows its Japanese protagonist across a series of imperial and neocolonial events, from the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Indian partition, 9/11, and the invasion of Afghanistan, all the while inscribing the trauma of these entangled events within the scarified body of the protagonist.20

One can imagine scanning recent syllabi on global literature (my own included) and endlessly cataloguing those novels that would fit the mold of an entanglement, either of the colonial or postcolonial iteration. I am not wholly against the assignation. Certainly, one of the welcome ramifications of these theses is that they connect the "global" and the contemporary to empire in a way that previous metaphors of connectivity such as "flow" or "network" did not. At the same time, there are mounting drawbacks to the emphases on intrinsic relation, contingency, ensnarement, inextricability, and complexity that inhere in the language of entanglement. For one, a recursive recourse to entanglement has begun to subsume and distort those narrative threads and lines of sight that had previously enabled solidarity, coalition, liberation or even critique. In its commanding descriptive valence (as an object or set of relations too complex to rationally map or control) the growing ubiquity of the entanglement metaphor delimits vision and the ability to make discrete units available to critical attention; it thus impairs comparativism and troubles planning, rendering the world, as Mbembe puts it, "A bundle of unforeseen events." 21 Swarming the master plans of modernity with "unforeseen forces," the turn to entanglement thinking at times seems to alibi a passive resignation to the dense tangle of a de-partitioned world. Like the miraculous hidden doors in Mohsin Hamid's Exit West (2017), which rapidly accelerate the apparently inevitable increase in global migrations, seeing the world always already as an entanglement risks naturalizing process ­­that remain the terrain of ongoing political struggle and contestation.22 To be sure, the explosion of the entanglement metaphor in recent years suggests that there is something bracing and remedial about theorizing and dwelling in a narrowing horizon of human agency. But once the old powers and partitions have been overturned, and the inextricability of the world's radical interconnectedness made palpable, how does one proceed? And can a literature prized for its explication of our "global entanglement" help us sort the mess out?

The Ends of Entanglement

To the above question of how we are to proceed in an inextricably and perhaps even catastrophically interconnected world, a growing number of scholars today council that we delve deeper into entanglement. "During the era of the Anthropocene," writes William Connolly, "a new generation in several places are forging reflective attachments to a broad range of people, nonhuman beings, and planetary forces with whom they are entangled." Such attachments "could make a critical difference to politics during the current era," Connolly concludes. 23 Meanwhile, Julietta Singh looks forward to a "politics of entanglement from which other world relations can begin to flourish" — a politics built around "new forms of engaged entanglement." 24 Admittedly, the prospect of an entangled alliance to come is attractive. For one, it offers an alternative to the stale binary of either political disengagement from a doomed world, or investment in saving civilization as we know it (through a technological remastering of nature). A politics of entanglement would be ontological rather than elective — and this could conceivably be a strength. Its objective would be democratic communities based in "primordial belonging," as Connolly puts it. 25 Resigned to the futility of controlling "world relations" or creating new ones, it would seek mutual flourishing in whatever lived reciprocity could be forged between always already entangled beings and things. And perhaps this is the most we can strive for.

Yet the seeming intractability of the world imagined always as an entanglement chafes with many aspirations of political life. This is already evident in the grammar of those who champion entanglement as an incipient political framework: Connolly calls for "attached entanglements";26 Singh speaks of "engaged entanglement" and "decolonial entanglements" (thus seizing on two markedly political terms to modify (or be modified by) the intransitivity of entanglement);27 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing sees the path forward as one of "enabling entanglements."28 These modifications express a desire to reinsert human agency into a process of fundamental connectivity. If politics can be woven from entanglements, it will involve the acquisition of some capacity for intervening and thus transforming the relations that exist: reversing the direction and pace of movements, removing partitions in some places and implementing boundaries in others (through taxes to the wealthy and blockages to multinational extraction and agro-industrial expansion for instance). In the process, though, we may change the very ontology of the structures that connect us. In other words: we might be nearing the ends of entanglement.

Rather than value and interpret Global Anglophone texts as markers and examples of the sublime complexity of a "global entanglement," we can be more unequivocal about what is so often evident in the narratives therein: an asymmetrical relation of subjugation and domination. A move in this direction would be aided, I think, by reassessing our present reliance on the language and critical optic of entanglement. As users, makers (and sometimes abusers) of global metaphors, literary critics do not interpret a stable spatial or temporal entity or set of processes, but actively shape our object of inquiry. Metaphor is the generative ground where critics act as world-makers in their own right, participating in the ongoing construction of the "global." As a noun entanglement is too often modified with adjectives like "complex," "fundamental," or "inextricable," which are value neutral. Yet one very rarely finds a modification that insists on particular relations of force and asymmetries, which might call up terms like dominant entanglement, extractive entanglement, inhibiting entanglement, repressive entanglement, financialized entanglement, and so on. Instead of continuing to modify the entanglement metaphor, though, we should strive to move beyond it. Our critical language and posture can afford to make the present battles over the rules of global connection more live and contestable and less a foregone conclusion. Doing so would be the beginning of a much-needed politicization of the field of Global Anglophone literature.

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Hadji Bakara is an assistant professor of English and Human Rights at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he teaches 20th- and 21st-century global literatures. He is completing his first book: Governments of the Tongue: A Literary History of Human Rights.

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