ABSTRACT
In an article provocatively entitled ‘Why Postcolonialism Hates Revolutions’, Tabish Khair once criticised the poststructuralist strand of postcolonial studies’ disavowal of ‘all claims of universality’, warning that such an emphasis ‘makes impossible […] the possibility of change in any revolutionary (and, hence, democratically collective) sense’ (Khair 1999, 7). This chapter comes from two motivations: firstly, to investigate the capacity of contemporary world literature to represent revolution, both historical and imagined, as explicit subject and content; and secondly, to explore the ecology of revolution. I begin by imagining a world-literary criticism that seeks to take account of the revolutionary political potential of literature to challenge our global present. My critical framework combines world-systems and world-ecology approaches to world literature as the literature of the capitalist world-system, while drawing on the Warwick Research Collective’s conceptualisation of this world-literature as mediating and figuring combined and uneven development (WReC 2015). However, world-systems approaches can tend towards a critique of domination that emphasises the top-down effects of inter-state competition, and thus it is urgent that world-literary critics read not only for critique of the totality of capitalism, but also the ways in which texts imagine and represent the making-of-history-from-below.
