Maps of Empire

Maps of Empire offers a series of deft close readings that highlight how mid-twentieth century writers draw on multiple traditions and histories to make explicit a world that is international, multilingual, and interconnected. Wanberg offers meticulously researched reception histories of literature authored during and after national liberation movements. These reception histories show how critics and reviewers have tended to deploy “imperial cartographies,” such as “North/South, East/West, Indigenous/settler-colonial,” as frameworks for positioning complex literary works (1). Wanberg goes on to demonstrate persuasively how this literature in fact reflects “richer topographies” that challenge binary and essentializing conceptions of place and identity (1). Wanberg’s book is exemplarily comparative insofar as it works across languages and geographies. Chapters center literary works translated from Arabic, French, Persian, and Pima. While Wanberg works predominately with English translations, his readings are attentive to the complexities of translation and frequently cite original works. In bringing its chosen texts together, Maps of Empire offers an expansive map of what world literary studies could be. Wanberg claims that one of the criteria for selecting works for the study was that they “not already be canonized as works of world literature” (17). The promise is realized, and a great potential pleasure of Maps of Empire is being introduced to works that, while well-known within respective area studies, may not have been encountered outside them.Chapter 1, “A Portmanteau of the Nation in Imīl Habībī’s The Pessoptimist,” establishes an argumentative pattern that will be repeated across chapters by showing how Habībī’s 1974 novel “resists a single identity” (20). While often “identified as belonging to the body of Israeli letters” (21), the fiction, Wanberg argues, challenges “the singular identity of the nation through the lived dynamics of non-transparency” (21). Tracing how the novel draws on both Arabic and European literary traditions, the chapter describes how The Pessoptimist deploys an expansive “exilic imagination,” and playfully reclaims an “Oriental imagination” that privileges opacity and secrecy, in order to defy the absolutisms of nationalisms (32; 35).In Chapter 2, Wanberg considers how essentializing readings have also shaped the reception of Camara Laye’s Le Regard du roi (1954). Wanberg argues critics of the novel, including some in the twenty-first century, have not fully acknowledged Laye’s “satirical hybridity” (59). Instead, relying on limited cartographic imaginations, they have claimed the work is too derivative of European models or that it was in fact written by a white man. Wanberg counters these critical arguments by maintaining that Le Regard is not only “a subtle challenge to colonialism” in its parody of white authority but also that it “performs a repatriation of modernism on an African stage” (64). Again, Wanberg stresses the importance of acknowledging the influence of multiple literary traditions on a work—something (Wanberg acknowledges) contemporary critics of African literature regularly do.The third chapter similarly seeks to challenge the exoticizing cartographic imaginary that opposes Europe and Africa by turning to Yambo Ouloguem’s Le Devoir de violence (1968). Wanberg’s central assertion, that a given African literary work exceeds or challenges this binary, is by now something of a commonplace in postcolonial and African literary criticism. The chapter’s thesis, however, does not fully capture what is interesting about the chapter’s argument, which is once more grounded in careful analysis of the novel’s reception and form. In one of the book’s most fascinating sections, Wanberg connects Ouloguem’s deployment of pastiche to the genre, technique, and politics of ghostwriting, as well as to ghostwriting’s connection to “histories of trauma and colonialism” (83). The theory of ghostwriting on offer in Ouologuem’s novel, Wanberg persuasively argues, rebuts accusations of plagiarism, and “subverts the values of authority, property, and originality that underpin the legal and proprietary traditions of European authorship” (88). Ouologuem, Wanberg concludes, “sets himself up as a ghostwriter of the French language, drawing out and making play with the problematic terminology that haunts and courses through it” (90).Chapter 4, “Disorientation and Horror in Sadeq Hedayat’s The Blind Owl” examines how Hedayat’s 1936 novel unsettles a reception history that has tended to interpret it as either “Western” or “Eastern” (95). Attending to what is “uncanny” about this “hybrid work” that reflects on European and Persian literary traditions (100), Wanberg concludes The Blind Owl disorients “the very binaries by which it has been defined” (124). Instructive in this chapter is Wanberg’s careful analysis of contemporary criticism that attends to the hybridity of the fiction but subtly reinscribes the binary between East and West that Wanberg argues the novel contests.The book’s final chapter marks a significant and somewhat surprising shift, as the book’s focus moves from fiction to oral performances of what Wanberg calls the Pima Ant Songs. Wanberg cites Jace Weaver as warning against the appropriation of Indigenous literary forms for the enrichment of American settler culture, and he concedes that his arguments “risk the same problem” (126). Wanberg addresses this risk by emphasizing the palimpsestic, mediated quality of orature. Attuned to the potential for misrecognition but meticulous in crafting an analysis in consultation with Virgil Lewis, an ‘Akimel O’odham elder, Wanberg persuasively reads the Ant Songs as “decolonial” in their unsettling of “the cartographic imagination of American settler culture” (126). In this chapter, as in a few other places in the book, I questioned who comprises the “our” in, for example, the claim that the Ant Song cycle can “change our ways of understanding authorship and representation”—implicitly it is an “our” that does not have a long critical tradition of valuing collective creation or oral expression (127). While Wanberg offers an account of the exclusions of world literature (scholars “often crudely neglect major Indigenous writers”), the related question of which literatures, methodologies, and critical traditions are centered and why as these exclusions are addressed through the construction of an “evolving canon” is also a question well-suited to the kind of topographical analysis Wanberg enacts (131).For this reason, Maps of Empire invites reflection on the potential limitations of conceiving world literary studies as an expansionist field that needs to, say, redress the sidelining of “works of oral production” within the discipline (127). Postcolonial studies centered on concepts such as hybridity, diaspora, and cosmopolitanism have long demonstrated how literary texts challenge or undo the essentializing cartographies of empire. Native American and Indigenous studies have done the same. While the book cites scholars from both these fields, its tendency to center the disciplinary discussions in the field of world literature means that it does not prioritize articulating its contributions to the established scholarship in other disciplines that have long critiqued imperial cartographic imaginaries. The book’s contributions to these discussions would be made clearer, I think, through additional justification as to how its chapters relate to each other. What is particular—formally, thematically, or historically—about how the chosen texts in Maps of Empire challenge imperial binaries? There are nascent, potential answers to this question threaded throughout the chapters, but recurrent, unifying arguments around, for example, humor and authority, could have been teased out and made more explicit. The book’s framing, in other words, could do further justice to the richness and originality of its carefully researched analyses

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Colonialism · Empire · Hegemony · Indigenous · Literature · Pleasure · World literature · History · Law · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies