Modernism/modernity

Among the most important books in literary studies in the last decade, Laura Doyle's Inter-imperiality: Vying Empires, Gendered Labor, and the Literary Arts of Alliance deserves sustained attention. Situated between comparative literary studies, world history, decolonial theory, and gender studies, Inter-imperiality recasts literary history as a counterpoint to the world history of empires. Profoundly interdisciplinary, it makes a forceful case for the relevance of literary analysis to the comparative study of empires—and coloniality.

Inter-imperiality offers a theory of relation, intersecting and supplementing accounts of relationality from Édouard Glissant to Shu-mei Shih. In this framework, subjectivity is inherently relational; we are always already in the world with others. Communities are likewise radically relational; whether states, empires, or villages, they form in relation to other communities. Doyle's book zooms in on the relational nature of empires in the longue durée. The inter in inter-imperiality names the co-formation and ongoing competition between empires, synchronically (empires compete) and diachronically (empires displace other empires or cull know-how from older empires). This account never suggests that empires are the only agents in world history; it does suggest, however, that before and after what Janet L. Abu-Lughod has called "European hegemony," power, inequality, and creative alliances have been distributed within an inter-imperial field.

The chapters of the book focus on a constellation of "shatterzones" with complex inter-imperial histories: the Middle East, Indonesia, eastern Europe, the Andes, the Caribbean, and the Maghreb. The legacy of multiple empires in these regions translates into multiple languages and literary traditions, multiple religious and spiritual traditions, multiple ethnic and racial fields. "Such regions need to be understood and honored," writes Doyle, "not as peripheral territories but as strategic inter-imperial zones, again and again vied over for their resources (including laborers) and their geopolitical location—before, during, and since the height of European hegemony" (15). Individual and collective agents maneuver within this inter-imperial field, a function of often contradictory [End Page 377] interpositioning, which includes "vying identifications" and "defensive attachments" (16). Such manuevering sees anti-colonial struggles sometimes enlisting the help of other empires or drawing from discourses of empire. At stake is a more nuanced understanding of "what this surround of multiple empires means from the perspective of the colonized" (37).

The legacy of competing empires includes material infrastructure but also language—literary language. We know that empires often use language and translation as instruments of control, but this book's signature dialectical move also reveals literature as a force. Inter-imperiality becomes "both a condition of aesthetic production and an object of literary representations" (25). Between these poles, literary analysis frames various modes in which "macropolitics play out in bodily microphysics" (26). Such analysis retraces the profile of literary characters or the affective dimensions of collective struggle, revealing how "literatures become reservoirs of a sedimented political consciousness" (25). A focus on the reader can "dramatize their audiences' compromising entanglements" (26). An embedded pluralism anchors this project's theory of relation: there is no empire, only empires; authors often "'write back' to multiple invaders and empires" (27). Since there is always more than one language at play in the inter-imperial field, literature is inherently multilingual.

Inter-imperiality is a welcome intervention in ongoing debates about world literature. The heart of the book consists of a multilevel reading of The Thousand and One Nights, "both exquisite example and historical catalyst of inter-imperial maneuvering through aesthetic forms" (69). First, this consequential choice places the urtext of world literature in the Arabic/Persian world, provincializing the Eurocentric canon. Second, this text comes before "European hegemony" but, through its translations, exists in relation to it. Third, the Orientalism that later attaches to The Thousand and One Nights, through translation, is produced in the context of Eurasian empires, decentering European Orientalism. Fourth, the circulation of literature is a function of translation, itself a version of translatio imperii. Fifth, this...