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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