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 Capitalauthored by Sharae Deckard, Michael Niblett, and Stephen Shapirowas 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 disciplinary fiefdoms 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 world-system that has been shaped by the logic of extractive capitalism for the past 500 years. Tracking Capital both continues the work of the Warwick Schools 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 self-enclosed totalities, world literatures, per Deckard, Niblett, and Shapiro, register entanglements within a world-market in which cultural production and social reproduction [are] constitutive, not epiphenomenal to economic exchange (69), and in which the modern novel tracks both global markets and all matter of geobiospheric relations (3).
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