Prof. Stacey Balkan reviews Tracking Capital: World-Systems, World-Ecology, World-Culture in ISLE
Prof. Stacey Balkan's is out in the August issue of ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment.
Tracking Capital鈥攁uthored by Sharae Deckard, Michael Niblett, and Stephen Shapiro鈥攚as published in March 2024 with SUNY.
The extract, as published on ISLE:
Tracking Capital offers a compelling introduction to the affordances of world-systems criticism for grappling with cultural forms that exceed the stale periodicity and 鈥渄isciplinary fiefdoms鈥� of the Anglo-European academy. Resonant with interventions in the energy humanities, this volume employs a world-systems analytic to track cultural productions that do not reflect or represent but register the 鈥渨orld-system鈥� that has been shaped by the logic of extractive capitalism for the past 500 years. Tracking Capital both continues the work of the Warwick School鈥檚 2015 Combined and Uneven Development: Toward a New Theory of World Literature and builds upon discussions around world literatures famously disputed by critics such as Pascale Casanova, Franco Moretti, Emily Apter, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. As 鈥渟elf-enclosed鈥� totalities, 鈥渨orld literatures,鈥� per Deckard, Niblett, and Shapiro, register entanglements within a world-market in which 鈥渃ultural production and social reproduction [are] constitutive, not epiphenomenal to 鈥榚conomic exchange鈥欌�� (69), and in which the modern novel tracks both global markets and 鈥渁ll matter of geobiospheric relations鈥� (3).
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