Immanuel Wallerstein and the Problem of the World

A collection of essays that bring the humanities into conversation with Immanuel Wallerstein's world-systems theory.

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: The Most Important Thing Happening 1

Part 1. System and Responsibility

The Modern World-System: Its Structures, Its Geoculture, Its Crisis and Transformation / Richard Lee 27

Blaming the System / Bruce Robbins 41

Part 2. Literature: Restructured, Re-historicized, Re-scaled

World-Systems Analysis, Evolutionary Theory, Weltliteratur / Franco Moretti 67

The Scale of World Literature / Nivrana Tanoukhi 78

Part 3. Respatializing, Remapping, Recognizing

The Space of the World: Beyond State-Centricism? / Neil Brenner 101

Cartographies of Connection: Ocean Maps as Metaphors for Inter-Area History / Kären Wigen 138

What Is a Poem?: The Event of Women and the Modern Girl as Problems in Global or World History / Tani E. Barlow 155

Part 4. Ethics, Otherness, System

Legal System of International Rights / Helen Stacy 187

Rationality and World-Systems Analysis: Fanon and the Impact of the Ethico-Historical / David Palumbo-Liu 202

Thinking about the Humanities / Immanuel Wallerstein 223

The Twilight of Capital? / Gopal Balakrishnan 227

Bibliography 233

Contributors 249

Index 251