The Commodity Frontier and Its Secret

Niblett, Michael

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-38581-1_2

Cited by 6 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…To this conception of world-culture we can add an understanding that the capitalist world-system is also a world-ecology . More recently, the ‘world-ecological turn’ has seen literary critics draw on the work of Jason W. Moore, in order to explore how the environmental history of capitalism and its evolution processes of frontierisation is mediated in world-literary aesthetics (Niblett, 2020) or to demonstrate how cultural production mediates ‘the fault-lines of ecology, race and gender’ and registers the ecology of women's work in relation to the socio-ecological relations that sustain capitalist accumulation (Oloff, 2016: 47). Moore formulates that the capitalist world-system is also a ‘capitalist world-ecology’, whose systemic cycles of accumulation are founded in organisational revolutions not only of social relations but also of those ‘bundles of human and biophysical natures’ that Moore labels ‘ecological regimes’ (2015: 9).…”

Section: Social Reproduction and World-culturementioning

confidence: 99%

“…[…] Readers hunger for large stories that … offer them some sort of large-scale vision' (Palumbo-Liu et al, 2011: 9). This issue takes its cue from those materialist scholars who draw on world-systems theory to argue that world-culture is best conceptualised with regard to the capitalist world-system, and, consequently, that the concept of combined and uneven development provides fruitful avenues through which to compare the aesthetic properties of seemingly diverse cultural forms (WReC, 2015;Macdonald, 2017;Shapiro and Barnard, 2017;Deckard and Shapiro, 2019;Lawrence, 2020;Mukherjee, 2020;Niblett, 2020;Poyner, 2020;Deckard, 2021;Lazarus, 2022;Oloff, 2023;Deckard et al, 2024).…”

Section: Social Reproduction and World-culturementioning

confidence: 99%

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Social Reproduction Feminism and World-Culture: Introduction

Deckard,

Houlden

2023

Feminist Theory

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Over twenty years ago, Amrita Basu, Inderpal Grewal, Caren Kaplan and Liisa Malkki argued that 'capitalism depended on sexism in order to be global ' (2001: 943). This special issue revisits and updates that claim by combining the critical lenses of social reproduction feminism, world-systems and world-ecology. As Basu et al. rightly observed, '[p]utting gender at the very center of considerations of globalization enables us to understand globalization as a set of very uneven processes that are based upon older hegemonic formations as well as new subjects and practices ' (2001: 943). In deploying a reinvigorated social reproduction feminismwhich attests to the importance of the daily work of creating and supporting the emotional and physical needs of life outside of that which capital is willing to pay forwe interrogate both hegemonic and newer, gendered labour practices at the heart of the contemporary moment. Our contributors' analyses of selected world-cultural production reflect how the battle for bodily autonomy, reproductive rights, equality of remuneration and recognition of 'women's work' as work rages on, in illustration of the global intensification of what Silvia Federici (2017) has called 'a true war against women'. 1Recent years have been characterised by the enduring sexual division of labour and caring work, increasingly gendered labour precarity, ongoing workplace limitations for women, endemic rape culture, the escalation of the battle for reproductive rights, entrenched racialised distinction between women's productive and reproductive labours and the continuing stigmatisation of trans lives. Yet the international war on women is not the only long-term crisis rapidly reaching critical mass. Ecological catastrophe and the climate violence wrought by capitalism feed into, and combine with,

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Section: Social Reproduction and World-culturementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Social Reproduction and World-culturementioning

confidence: 99%

Social Reproduction Feminism and World-Culture: Introduction

Deckard,

Houlden

2023

Feminist Theory

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“…[…] Cultural forms, including literary works, can be grasped as a species of social knowledge fundamentally interwoven with the reproduction of material life." 30 It's worth noting that culture is here not understood as a self-regulating and self-harmonizing "ecosystem" threatened by an exterior, externalized capitalist order, pace Hubert Zapf's notion of "cultural ecology." 31 (Indeed, the very notions of holism and ecosystem arise out of fundamentally racist evolutionary sciences that developed alongside free-market neoliberalism.)…”

Section: Experimental Writing As World-buildingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Speculative World-Building, Modernity, and the Text in Crisis: An Ecological Reading of Renee Gladman’s Ravicka Novels

Schauss

2023

Comparative Literature Studies

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This article considers the interrelation between capitalist modernity as ecological crisis and the crisis of the textual economy in Renee Gladman’s experimental novels set in the fictional city-state of Ravicka (2010–2017). The article shows how Gladman attempts to reposition the experimental work within the world-literary field by framing the text itself as ecological, at once implicated in cultural and geopolitical modes of production and circulation, and generative in terms of speculative world-building. The article focuses on Gladman’s exploration of urban space and architecture in relation to ecological catastrophe, and draws comparisons with other speculative designs, such as the People’s Parliament of Rojava in Northern Syria. While Gladman’s eroding architectural-linguistic landscape translates world-ecological issues like forced displacement, race, gender, pollution, and unevenly distributed forms of eco-political violence, her texts also problematize projection and allegorical modes of reading, signaling the abstraction of social relations in modernity. The article suggests that Gladman’s experimental writing ultimately hopes to open a new space of relational, embodied thinking while finding creative energy and resilience within the political constraints of literary production.

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“…When the conceptual insights of social reproduction feminism are incorporated alongside an approach to world-literature as 'the literature of the world-system' (Warwick Research Collective, 2015: 8) and as 'the literature of the world-ecology' (Niblett, 2020:10) , our critical focus is redirected from literary representations of the struggles of waged (male) proletariats or of statist struggles in the context of decolonisation towards representations of movements arising on the terrain of social reproduction itself, but also to how waged and statist struggles themselves depend on the accompanying organisation of workers in social reproduction, whether in material provision of food and water, or the immaterial resources of nurture. While intensities and valences of literary representation vary – in some texts social reproduction is a critically conscious horizon, in others it is consigned to the political unconscious – I would argue that social reproduction ineluctably appears at the level of content.…”

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confidence: 99%

Social reproduction, struggle and the ecology of ‘women's work’ in world-literature

Deckard

2023

Feminist Theory

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Building on the insights of feminist scholars such as Maria Mies, Wilma Dunaway and Harriet Friedmann that ‘women's work’ in the realm of social reproduction, particularly in the (semi-)peripheries of the world-ecology, often draws heavily upon natural resources and is thus preponderantly affected by forms of resource depletion and environmental crisis including water scarcity, land degradation, pollution and toxification, this article argues for an approach to world-literary criticism that incorporates the insights of social reproduction feminism in order to interpret how literature of the capitalist world-ecology mediates social reproduction. I contend that world-literary criticism can help illuminate the socio-ecology of gendered forms of labour, by analysing how bodily dispositions, subjectivities and habituses corresponding to gendered divisions at household and systemic scales are mediated in specific literary aesthetics, and recuperating the utopian prospects of how texts imagine forms of struggle as arising from the contradictions immanent to capital's dependence on the unpaid work of both nature and social reproduction. In particular, reading novels by Kamala Markandaya, Ousmane Sembène and Latife Tekin, I explore three different world-literary depictions of types of environment-making labour that have been gendered as ‘women's work’ – foodgetting, water-carrying and waste-picking – in order to examine how novels imagine the terrain of social reproduction both as a site of appropriation, violence and crisis, and as the potential ground for organised resistance.

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The Commodity Frontier and Its Secret

Cited by 6 publications

References 5 publications

Social Reproduction Feminism and World-Culture: Introduction

Social Reproduction Feminism and World-Culture: Introduction

Speculative World-Building, Modernity, and the Text in Crisis: An Ecological Reading of Renee Gladman’s Ravicka Novels

Social reproduction, struggle and the ecology of ‘women's work’ in world-literature

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