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NEW CO
MPARIS
ONS IN
WORLD L
IT ERATUR
E
Edited by
SHARAE DECKARD
STEPHEN SHAPIRO
World
Literature,
Neoliberalism,
and the Culture
of Discontent
New Comparisons in World Literature
Series Editors
Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee
University of Warwick
Coventry, UK
Neil Lazarus
University of Warwick
Coventry, UK
New Comparisons in World Literature offers a fresh perspective on one of
the most exciting current debates in humanities by approaching ‘world
literature’ not in terms of particular kinds of reading but as a particular
kind of writing. We take ‘world literature’ to be that body of writing that
registers in various ways, at the levels of form and content, the historical
experience of capitalist modernity. We aim to publish works that take up
the challenge of understanding how literature registers both the global
extension of ‘modern’ social forms and relations and the peculiar new
modes of existence and experience that are engendered as a result. Our
particular interest lies in studies that analyse the registration of this deci-
sive historical process in literary consciousness and affect.
Editorial board
Dr. Nicholas Brown, University of Illinois, USA; Dr. Bo G. Ekelund,
University of Stockholm, Sweden; Dr. Dorota Kolodziejczyk, Wroclaw
University, Poland; Professor Paulo de Medeiros, University of Warwick,
UK; Dr. Robert Spencer, University of Manchester, UK; Professor Imre
Szeman, University of Alberta, Canada; Professor Peter Hitchcock, Baruch
College, USA; Dr Ericka Beckman, University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign, USA; Dr Sarah Brouillette, Carleton University, Canada;
Professor Supriya Chaudhury, Jadavpur University, India; Professor
Stephen Shapiro, University of Warwick, UK.
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15067
Sharae Deckard • Stephen Shapiro
Editors
World Literature,
Neoliberalism, and the
Culture of Discontent
Editors
Sharae Deckard Stephen Shapiro
Dublin, Republic of Ireland Coventry, UK
New Comparisons in World Literature

ISBN 978-3-030-05440-3 ISBN 978-3-030-05441-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05441-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018965469
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2019
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
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electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-
lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the
material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institu-
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Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Acknowledgements
As editors of a collection, our thanks are due first to this volume’s con-
tributors. Pablo Mukherjee and Neil Lazarus, as series editors, were the
first to open doors and ensure that we made it down the various hallways
towards publication. In a broader sense, we thank WReC (Warwick
Research Collective) and the emerging community of world-literature
scholars, including the World Literature Network and World-Ecology
Research Network, for their collective intellectual and political support.
We are likewise grateful for support from our colleagues in the School
of English, Drama, and Film Studies at University College Dublin. Finally,
Tomas René, Vicky Bates, and the staff at Palgrave have been generous
with their help and attention to the preparation and design of the
volume.
We dedicate this to Benita Parry, our teacher, and Phillip Baldwin, of
Brooklyn.
v
Contents
1 World-Culture and the Neoliberal World-System: An

Introduction 1
Sharae Deckard and Stephen Shapiro
2 The Long 1970s: Neoliberalism, Narrative Form, and

Hegemonic Crisis in the Work of Marlon James and Paulo
Lins 49
Michael Niblett
3 From “Section 936” to “Junk”: Neoliberalism, Ecology,

and Puerto Rican Literature 69
Kerstin Oloff
4 Mont Neoliberal Periodization: The Mexican “Democratic

Transition,” from Austrian Libertarianism to the “War on
Drugs” 93
Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado
5 Cricket’s Neoliberal Narratives: Or the World of

Competitive Accumulation and Sporting Spirit in
Contemporary Cricket Fiction111
Claire Westall
vii
viii CONTENTS
6 Keeping It Real: Literary Impersonality Under

Neoliberalism131
Daniel Hartley
7 The Cultural Regulation of Neoliberal Capitalism157

Mathias Nilges
8 Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite: Monetized War,

Militarized Money—A Narrative Poetics for the Closing
of an American Century175
Richard Godden
9 A Bubble in the Vein: Suicide, Community, and the

Rejection of Neoliberalism in Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little
Life and Miriam Toews’s All My Puny Sorrows195
Amy Rushton
10 Futures, Inc.: Fiction and Intellectual Property in the

(South) African Renaissance215
Matthew Eatough
11 Trains, Stone, and Energetics: African Resource Culture

and the Neoliberal World-Ecology239
Sharae Deckard
Index263
Notes on Contributors
Sharae Deckard is Lecturer in World Literature at University College

Dublin. She is author of Paradise Discourse, Imperialism and Globalization
(2010) and co-author (with the Warwick Research Collective) of Combined
and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature
(2015). With Rashmi Varma, she is co-editor of Marxism, Postcolonial
Theory and the Future of Critique: Critical Engagements with Benita Parry
(2019). She has also edited special issues of Ariel, Journal of World-Systems
Research, Green Letters, and Journal of Postcolonial Writing. Her research
centres on world-ecology and world-systems approaches to postcolonial
and world literature.
Matthew Eatough is Assistant Professor of English at Baruch College,
City University of New York. He is the assistant editor of the Oxford
Handbook of Global Modernisms (2012), and is completing a book manu-
script with the provisional title Long Waves of Modernity: Global History,
the World-System, and the Making of the Anglophone Novel.
Richard Godden teaches in the English Department at the University of
California, Irvine. He is the author of Fictions of Capital: The American
Novel from James to Mailer (1990); Fictions of Labour: William Faulkner
and the South’s Long Revolution (1997); and William Faulkner: An
Economy of Complex Words (2007). He is completing an account of the
narrative poetics of the financial turn, at the closing of an American
Century, provisionally titled, Paper Graveyards.
ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Daniel Hartley is Assistant Professor in World Literatures in English at

Durham University, UK. He is the author of The Politics of Style: Towards
a Marxist Poetics (2017), and is working on a comparative study of literary
impersonality in world literature across the long twentieth century. He has
published widely on Marxist theory and contemporary literature.
Michael Niblett is Assistant Professor in Modern World Literature at the
University of Warwick. He is the author of The Caribbean Novel since 1945
(2012) and co-editor of Perspectives on the ‘Other America’: Comparative
Approaches to Caribbean and Latin American Culture (2009). His most
recent book is the co-edited collection The Caribbean: Aesthetics, World-
Ecology, Politics (2016).
Mathias Nilges is Associate Professor of English at St. Francis Xavier
University, Canada. His essays have appeared in collected editions and
journals such as American Literary History, Callaloo, College Literature,
CR: The New Centennial Review, and Textual Practice. He is co-editor of
Literary Materialisms (2013), Marxism and the Critique of Value (2014),
The Contemporaneity of Modernism (2015), and Literature and the Global
Contemporary (2017), and the author of Right-Wing Culture and
Opportunistic Futurism in Contemporary Capitalism (2019).
Kerstin Oloff is Associate Professor in Hispanic Studies in the School of
Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Durham, UK. She
writes on Caribbean and Latin American literature, gothic and monstrous
aesthetics, world-literature, and ecocriticism.
Amy Rushton is a lecturer in the Department of English, Communications,
and Philosophy at Nottingham Trent University, UK, where she teaches
American and postcolonial literature. Her research intersects with postco-
lonial studies and world-systems theory, and she is writing a book on con-
temporary African fiction, tragedy, and neo-colonialism.
Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado is the Jarvis Thurston and Mona Van Duyn
Professor of the Humanities at Washington University in St Louis. He is
the author of seven books and over 100 articles, and editor of 12 critical
collections, on Mexican and Latin American literature, culture, cinema, and
theory. His most recent books are Pierre Bourdieu in Hispanic Literature
and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan 2018) and Strategic Occidentalism: On
Mexican Fiction, the Neoliberal Book Market and the Question of World
Literature (2018).
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xi
Stephen Shapiro teaches in the Department of English and Comparative

Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. He is author of The Culture
and Commerce of the Early American Novel: Reading the Atlantic World-
System (2008); How to Read Marx’s Capital (2008); and Pentecostal
Modernism: Lovecraft, Los Angeles, and World-System Culture (2017), with
Philip Barnard; and How To Read Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (2011),
with Anne Schwan. He is also a co-author (with the Warwick Research
Collective) of Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory
of World-Literature (2015). Additionally, he has co-published editions
of Charles Brockden Brown’s writing, The Wire: Race, Class, and Genre
(2012), with Liam Kennedy, and a forthcoming collection, with Liam
Kennedy, Neoliberalism and Contemporary American Literature.
Claire Westall is a senior lecturer in the Department of English and
Related Literature at the University of York. Her forthcoming book is The
Rites of Cricket and Caribbean Literature (Palgrave Macmillan). She is
also co-author of The Public on the Public (2015), and co-editor of
both Cross-Gendered Literary Voices (2012) and Literature of an
Independent England (2013).
CHAPTER 1
World-Culture and the Neoliberal World-

System: An Introduction
Sharae Deckard and Stephen Shapiro
The Problem of Neoliberalism

Almost unused as a term in the twentieth century and never unequivocally
deployed by the historical figures now routinely taken as its exemplary
advocates, “neoliberalism” has, nonetheless, become a standard keyword
to categorize the present regime of accumulation, especially after the 2008
financial crash that made the term “globalization” seem inadequate.
Thanks to a wide spectrum of critics such as David Harvey, Naomi Klein,
Michel Foucault, Wendy Brown, Jamie Peck, Jason W. Moore, Neil Smith,
Philip Mirowski, Anatole Kaletsky, and Gérard Duménil and Dominique
Lévy, we have developed a synoptic familiarity with the term and a com-
monsensical understanding of its manoeuvres as characterized by a nexus
of practices and axiomatic assumptions about recent modes of capitalist
commerce.
S. Deckard (*)
Dublin, Republic of Ireland
e-mail: [email protected]
S. Shapiro (*)
Coventry, UK
e-mail: [email protected]
© The Author(s) 2019 1

S. Deckard, S. Shapiro (eds.), World Literature, Neoliberalism, and
the Culture of Discontent, New Comparisons in World Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05441-0_1
2 S. DECKARD AND S. SHAPIRO
Features of neoliberalism include state deregulation of markets, privati-

zation, and anti-labour and social welfare strategies; the ascendancy of
finance capital; the renewed imperialism of law-and-order schemes on the
global level (as in the endless “war on terror”) and in domestic arenas (as
with the creation of a prison industrial complex); the elite project of wealth
redistribution through new forms of ecological enclosure and accumula-
tion via dispossession; the proliferation of metrics that spur competition in
new realms of social life and administrative oversight; the exploitation of
crises and disasters to force the imposition of austerity and structural
adjustment; the increased biopolitical control of individuals by the state;
the redefinition of individuals as quantums of human capital rather than
subjects of interior development or political representation; the deploy-
ment of mass personal debt in ways little foreseen by prior macroeconom-
ics; and the emergence of new algorithmic technologies of surveillance
and financialization that have penetrated everyday life.
Yet, as the term spreads through academic and media apparatuses, it is
in danger of becoming so ubiquitous that its historical insight is blurred
and its analytical edge is blunted or lost. As Taylor Boas and Jordan Gans-
Morse observe:
Neoliberalism is commonly used in at least five different ways in the study of

development—as a set of economic policies, a development model, an ideol-
ogy, an academic paradigm, and an historical era. Moreover, beyond a
shared emphasis on the free market and frequent connotations of radicalism
and negativity, it is not immediately clear how these varied uses are intercon-
nected. (Boas and Gans-Morse 2006: 38, cited in Mirowski 2009: 433–34)
As an academic paradigm referring to cultural production, the descriptor

neoliberal is frequently used in literary criticism as a mere successor to
“postmodern,” an earlier term also meant to be periodizing, yet which itself
lacked a historical exit. This usage can be seen in the proliferation of curi-
ously ahistorical critiques of neoliberalism which do not name capital, and
tend to theorize neoliberalism’s novelty solely in terms of governmentality
rather than capital accumulation of affects and ontologies of the entrepre-
neurial self, rather than class exploitation. Such a theoretical tendency has a
cultural logic of its own, corollary to the post-1970s retreat from class as a
category of analysis and the subsequent illusion of “posthistory.”
Detached from materialist analysis of the wider world-economy in rela-
tion to capitalism’s long modernity, these kinds of exegeses of “neoliberal
WORLD-CULTURE AND THE NEOLIBERAL WORLD-SYSTEM… 3
culture” focus instead on the cultural or ideological symptoms of neoliber-

alism as they are experienced in post-Fordist core nation-states of Europe
and America (and overemphasize post-Fordism as a phenomenon), rather
than critiquing the processes of neoliberalization from a world-historical
perspective of capitalism’s developmental cycles. This is not dissimilar to
the pitfalls of earlier varieties of postcolonial criticism, which focused on
culturalist critique of imperialism, to the exclusion of capitalism (thus fore-
going understanding of the specific role of imperialism within capitalist
accumulation).
Conversely, critiques of neoliberalism from the social sciences often
concentrate solely on the analysis of political elites, economists, or elec-
toral parties, assigning them primary credit for the development and
implementation of neoliberal ideologies and policies, while failing to
examine how culture plays a constitutive role in generating and stabilizing
the socioeconomic relations on which neoliberal hegemony depends, or
how the ideological innovations and development projects of political
elites are necessarily bound up with the complex causality of capitalism’s
historical cyclical crises.
Consequently, a common response by many left critics to recent discus-
sions about neoliberalism is that the term has lost its utility as a means of
characterizing the current phase of capitalism, and should be discarded for
its failure to clarify the features of the purported period in relation to the
overall operations of capital’s logistic across centuries. However, we feel
this momentary exhaustion to be tactically clumsy and analytically mis-
guided. Given the difficulty the left has historically had in Anglo-American
societies in getting its terminology broadly accepted as objective in ways
outside its otherwise limited congeries, we should pause before abandon-
ing a term simply when a limited group of commentators has become
distracted or bored by the lack of novelty. As Mathias Nilges suggests in
this volume, neoliberalism can retain its use as a “Kampfbegriff, a term of
struggle” that enables us to frame both critique and resistance.
An additional semantic confusion emerges over whether neoliberalism
ought to be considered a break from postmodernism or if, in retrospect,
as we would argue, postmodernism can be now perceived as the cultural
logic of incipient or insurgent neoliberalism. In “Periodizing the 60s,”
Fredric Jameson defines that decade as the moment in which “the enlarge-
ment of capitalism on a global scale simultaneously produced an immense
freeing or unbinding of social energies” in both the First and Third Worlds,
leading to monetary, social, and cultural inflationary pressures that were
subsequently reined in by the early 1970s (1984: 208). Writing from the
vantage point of 1984, Jameson predicted that “the 80s will be character-
ized by an effort on a world scale to proletarianize all those unbound
social forces which gave the 60s their energy, by an extension of the class
struggle, into the furthest reaches of the globe as well as the most minute
configurations of local institutions (such as the university system)” (208).
Jameson is of course one of the foremost theorists of “postmodernism” as
the cultural logic of “late capitalism,” but the passages here seem pre-
sciently indicative of the onset of what we now call “neoliberalism,” at a
time when that terminology was not readily available.
For whatever objections about the specificity of the term neoliberalism
can be raised, it seems clear that in many ways the current phase of capital-
ism is different in noteworthy ways from the prior Fordist and Keynesian
phase. Surely, some terminology must exist to register the differences if any
activist response is to be successfully mounted. The challenge then is to
forge a better framework of terms to help convey what is both distinctive
and familiar about the last few decades up to and including the contempo-
rary period. There remains a pressing need to underscore the continuities
of capitalist predicates, while also discerning its historical formations and
reformations.
A major motive for this collection, therefore, is to prevent “neoliberal-
ism” from becoming a “quicksand term” that indiscriminately sucks all
commentary into its maw without regard to temporal or spatial particular-
ity; that acts as a vacuous counterpart to “post-postmodern,” or even
“late-late capitalism.” In our estimation, the way forward is to think
through issues of historical alteration through a greater horizon of the
capitalist world-system. Hence, this volume mobilizes a collection of
essays that seek to periodize the different phases of neoliberal accumula-
tion leading up to the current moment, restoring the horizon of capitalism
as the primary object of their critique, while at the same time exploring
how neoliberalization is differently experienced and mediated in cores,
semiperipheries, and peripheries of the world-system. As Matthew Eatough
writes in his contribution to this volume, any account of the culture of
neoliberalism requires us to formulate a working definition of what neo-
liberalism is in its local expression and “what distinguishes it from the
normative Euro-American model of neoliberalism.”
Most collections on neoliberalism and literature published thus far have
had an exclusively North American or British focus, which we seek to chal-
lenge in this volume through a comparative approach that juxtaposes
scholars from American and British studies with those from postcolonial
and world-literary studies and area studies. Thus, our contributions con-
centrate on a wide range of literary and cultural production from global
settings in both cores and semiperipheries, and frequently make compari-
sons between them, including Mexico, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Brazil, the
United States, Canada, Italy, South Africa, the Democratic Republic of
Congo, Senegal, and India.
In this volume’s conceptual endeavour to redefine neoliberalism, our
main aims are threefold. Firstly, we seek to rehistorize neoliberal move-
ments within a world-systems perspective that may better link together,
rather than split apart, the insights of Foucauldian accounts of govern-
mentality and Marx’s critique of the dynamics of capitalist exploitation.
Such a world-systems perspective enables a more comprehensive under-
standing of the ways in which capitalism requires structural inequalities
that are produced through the constellation of a core-zone, semiperipher-
ies, and peripheries. This perspective requires an attentiveness to the
ongoing and interwoven role of regions beyond the “white” Euro-
American nation-states that have not only often been treated in isolation
from one another (as if their dynamics are not shaped by inter-core com-
petition) but also disconnected from other regions, which are often con-
sidered as instances of note only to the degree they develop in ways that
emulates or reproduces the logistics of the core nations (often frequently
those of their former colonial occupiers).
Secondly, we seek not only to differentiate a neoliberal period from
prior periods in capitalism’s history but also to grasp the temporal shifts
and differentials within this phase. The enactments during the 1980s are
different from recent ones, even while both are best grouped within a
larger context. To foreshadow our argument, we contend that one source
of confusion in scholarly discussions of neoliberalism has been the lack of
consideration for the nested, rather than linear and sequential, quality of
the roughly post-1970s period. Just as there are mini-cycles or conjunc-
tures within this phase, this phase is a segment within other longer cycles.
While what has been called neoliberalism deserves to be analysed as differ-
ent from and in opposition to the mid-twentieth century formations that
we will broadly call Keynesian and Fordist, it also exists as a cadenza within
a greater phase that arose in the late nineteenth century in the period after
Marx’s analysis of capital as it existed in the mid-nineteenth century.
As Kennedy and Shapiro argue, neoliberalism ought to be seen as con-
taining 40–50-year cycles that are stitched together by an overlapping
“hinge” or “Sattelzeit” period (Kennedy and Shapiro 2019). The first

phase runs from the 1930s through the mid-1960s, wherein different, but
often inter-dependent, responses to the economic crisis of the Great
Depression and the political one involving the rise of right-wing politics
are exemplified by the Nazi, Fascist, and Falangist regimes. Hence, in
many ways, neoliberalism can be understood as developing alongside
Keynesianism, and not simply or clearly afterwards. In this way, the pres-
ent moment may stand potentially as a conclusion to both neoliberalism
and a greater duration of approximately 90 years.
When this first phase of neoliberalism came into crisis (more below),
there ensued a contested decade from the mid-1960s to the early/mid-
1970s in which there arose both avenues to overcome neoliberalism and
neoliberal preparations for a substantive move to become a more domi-
nant force, as would historically occur. A second phase then runs from the
early/mid-1970s until roughly the 2008/11 crisis. As before, the current
moment is likewise a mixed moment that contains both substantive efforts
to displace neoliberalism, while also presenting aspects of what may emerge
as a third longer phase (Shapiro 2019).
Yet, even this frame might not be expansive enough, since our current
moment of “late” neoliberalism may also mark the movement of capitalist
core hegemony outside of the dominant states of Western Europe and
North America towards East and South Asia, meaning that for the first
time in about 500 years, capitalism’s lodestar will no longer be easily con-
flated with Anglo-European primacy. The synchronization of these differ-
ently lengthened spirals of capitalist expanded reproduction has meant
that some critics mistake differences where they should espy continuities
and vice-versa. To better understand the general logistic of capitalism in its
neoliberal particularities, we will discuss below the difference between
periodization and periodicity. Due to the nested quality of capitalism’s
cycles, we prefer the term “long spiral” to the more conventional, but in
our minds overly sequential and two-dimensional, “long wave.” The key-
word long spiral better captures how the expanded circuit of capital’s
reproduction actually operates, as well as also better encouraging us to
perceive wormholes, those analogous moments that burrow across long
periods within cyclical capitalism.
Thirdly, in this collection, we insist on the constitutive role of culture in
all its textual, televisual, sonic, behavioural, performative, and socially
reproductive forms, while understanding that cultural productions have a
distinctiveness based on their dynamic location within the world-system.
The Neoliberal World-System

Our conception of neoliberal world-culture follows the WReC’s (Warwick
Research Collective) proposition that the analytic category of world-
literature designates “a single but radically uneven world-system; a singu-
lar modernity, combined and uneven; and a literature that variously
registers this combined unevenness in both its form and its content to
reveal itself as, properly speaking, world-literature” (WReC 2015: 49),
but with the added understanding that it must therefore also be literature
of the “Capitalocene,” Jason W. Moore’s term to designate the geological
era dominated by the organization of nature-society within the capitalist
world-ecology (Moore 2016: 1). As such, we argue for a critical approach
to neoliberal world-culture aggregating:
1. a world-historical perspective of the nested temporalities of capital-

ism’s durées and cycles
2. a world-ecological conceptualization of capitalism as not only a
world-economy, but as constituted by and through ecological
regimes
3. a world-literary reading practice attentive to the aesthetic mediation
of combined and uneven development and to the hierarchical dif-
ferentiation of the world-system between cores, semiperipheries,
and peripheries
Crucially, this constellation of world-literary methodologies moves

beyond national-based criticism to comparison of multiple literary units,
located not only in different spaces but also in different temporal moments
of capitalism’s longue durée, with the singular modernity of the world-
system acting as an “universal baseline of comparison” (Brown 2005: 3).
In “World-Systems Analysis,” Immanuel Wallerstein summarizes the
world-systems perspective in three defining characteristics. Firstly, he
asserts that the appropriate unit of geopolitical analysis is a “world-sys-
tem,” rather than isolated nation-states or regional areas. Secondly, he
contends that each world-system has a finite, albeit long, duration, with
several phases embedded within it. Finally, he focuses on “one particular
world-system,” the “capitalist world-economy” (Wallerstein 1990: 288).
This capitalist world-economy is distinguished by a number of ele-
ments. Its driving force is the ceaseless accumulation of capital. It is hier-
archically striated by an axial division of labour in which there is a
core-periphery tension, such that there is some form of unequal exchange

(not necessarily as defined originally by Arghiri Emmanuel) that is spatial;
at the same time, there are semiperipheral zones that mediate between
cores and peripheries. Unwaged labour, particularly that of the hidden
abode of social reproduction, continues to play a large and continuing role
alongside that of wage labour within this world-economy. Wallerstein
underlines the fundamental importance of racism and patriarchy in con-
cert with class as organizing principles of the system’s hierarchical exploi-
tation of labour, and insists on the nonprimordial character of states,
ethnic groups, and households, all of which are constantly created and
recreated. This systemic constellation of gender, race, class, and ecology in
relations of exploitation and appropriation has been importantly devel-
oped by the recent efflorescence of social reproduction theory by feminist
critics building on the important work of forerunners such as Silvia
Federici, the often-neglected Wilma Dunaway, who emphasizes the need
to “rescue women from the periphery of world-systems thought”(Dunaway
2002: 127), and Maria Mies, with her powerful critique of the way the
capitalist division of labour appropriates the unpaid work of “women,
nature, and colonies” (Mies 1986).
In contrast to the conventional Marxist focus on the nineteenth cen-
tury, Wallerstein locates the origins of the capitalist world-economy ear-
lier, in the sixteenth century, and thus speaks of 500 years of capitalist
modernity. He contends that the capitalist world-economy began in one
part of the world (largely Europe) and later expanded to the entire globe
via a process of successive, if violent, incorporations. The boundaries of
this world-economy align to an interstate system comprised of sovereign
states in competition with each other. Within this system arise hegemonic
states, each of whose periods of full or uncontested hegemony has, how-
ever, been relatively brief. At the same time, anti-systemic movements and
world-revolutions periodically emerge from below and simultaneously
undermine and reinforce the system. Capitalism as a world-system is char-
acterized by a pattern of both cyclical rhythms and secular trends that
incarnate the inherent contradictions of the system and which account for
the systemic crisis in which we are presently living (Wallerstein 1990:
287). Wallerstein concludes by emphasizing the need for contemporary
critics to focus on comparative approaches to inequality and on the iden-
tification of possible exits from the capitalist world-system (1990: 292).
In this, we would echo Wallerstein’s suggestion that the traditional dis-
ciplinary separation of studies of the market, the state, and culture from
one another is untenable in the context of neoliberal world-culture, and

that a new more integrated, transdisciplinary analysis is necessary.
Furthermore, we wish to highlight the significance of the semiperiphery
to our exploration of the role of culture. In discussions of the core-
semiperiphery-periphery, the tendency has been to treat these as spaces,
rather than processes, thus reducing the world-system to a homogeneous
geography of nation-states. Understood in terms of logistics rather than
reified territory, core zones are those which tend to have multiple produc-
tion processes, often involving secondary or finishing processes: core states
are strong sovereign states that are able to enforce their decisions about
the trans-boundary movements of goods, people, and capital (Wallerstein
2004: 46). In contrast, peripheral regions have weak sovereignty and usu-
ally tend towards monocultures of cash crops or extractive industries of
single export commodities, while semiperipheries combine the two
processes.
Mike Davis provides a useful alternative characterization of the divi-
sions of the contemporary neoliberal world-system when he describes our
“current period” as
defined by a trilogy of ideal-typical economies: superindustrial (coastal East

Asia financial/tertiary (North Atlantic), and hyperurbanizing/extractive
(West Africa). “Jobless growth” is incipient in the first, chronic in the sec-
ond, and absolute in the third. We might add a fourth ideal-type of disinte-
grating society whose chief trend is the export of refugees and migrant
labor. (Davis 2018: 7)
Using Davis’s ideal types of the North Atlantic core, East Asian semiper-
iphery, and West African periphery, we want to insist that core-
semiperiphery-periphery be understood as relational zones that operate
on multiple scales, rather than strictly national spheres. The movements of
goods, peoples, and environmental resources mean that the peripheries
exist both outside and within cores. Each spatial level (whether the house-
hold, city, region, nation, or macro-area) contains its own internal core-
periphery differences (Shapiro 2008: 33).
As Neil Smith puts it, uneven development as both “social inequality
blazoned” onto the landscape and as the exploitation of “geographical
unevenness for certain socially determined ends” is “highly visible in land-
scapes as the difference between developed and underdeveloped spaces at
different scales: the developed and the underdeveloped world, developed
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regions and declining regions, suburbs and the inner city” (2010: 206).
Urban settings have their own class-differentiated regions, from the
peripheral slums inhabited by manual labour forces and reserve armies of
the unemployed, to the core sectors where elite classes live and work. At a
higher level, individual nation-states are divided between internal periph-
eral and core-like zones, such as north/south and urban/agrarian divi-
sions. The urban cores of these different zones are often organized within
a ‘city-system’, where some cities are more dominant than others, and rise
and fade in prominence; at the global level, core cities in the world city
system exercise more power than others, whether in finance, industry, and
international politics or in the dissemination, translation, and consecration
of cultural capital.
However, because the social action of cores is too incommensurate
with that of the peripheries, the world-system requires a third calibrating
zone, the semiperiphery, in order to “translate” the culture and commodi-
ties of each sphere to another:
[The semiperiphery] receives, monetarizes, and forwards two kinds of com-

modities: the core’s “fictional” ones of credit, insurance, and contractual
property and intellectual rights and the periphery’s labor-power and natural
resources. As the “transistor” space where two different segments of a com-
modity chain become articulated and receive their first pricing, the semiper-
iphery is the contact zone that makes it possible for the core and periphery to
transmit value to each other, especially as both the rural dispossessed of the
hinterlands and the factors of the core’s jobbing interests congregate there,
one to commodify their labor and the other to finance and insure the material
apparatuses that will consume this labor-power. (Shapiro 2008: 37–38)
Semiperipheries exist simultaneously in core nations, like the United

Kingdom, the United States, or Germany, and in peripheral nations with
weaker sovereignty, like African or Caribbean states. In these sites, the
experiences of traumatic dispossession and exploitation by people from
peripheries subjected to primitive accumulation, enclosure, and extraction
collide together with the speculative entrepreneurship, technical innova-
tions, jobbing interests, and cultural forms of the core. In the peripheries,
the systemic violence and unevenness produced by capitalist development
are frequently starker, more brutally manifested. Semiperipheral cultural
forms mediating these experiences might thus be expected to display a
greater apprehension of the inequality and hierarchy that characterizes the
world-system’s divisions.
Consequently, we argue that the semiperipheries are the zones where

political economy receives its greatest cultural inflection, where socioeco-
nomic and socio-ecological contradictions are amplified and mediated
through new cultural innovations. This encounter often produces new
forms of world-cultural representation, conjoining oral cultures, folkloric
materials, and indigenous knowledge-systems from the periphery with the
printed traditions, behavioural performances, and institutionally conse-
crated notations of the core (Shapiro 2008: 38). Thus, Stephen Shapiro
and Philip Barnard see religious innovations, like Pentecostalism, as aris-
ing in the semiperipheral tissues of the United States in the early twentieth
century (Shapiro and Barnard 2017), while Michael Denning, as treated
in Sharae Deckard’s chapter in this volume, heralds the emergence of
world-music in the 1920s in the global archipelago of semiperipheral har-
bour towns and ports that received the music of deruralized peoples from
agrarian peripheries in colonies, and linked them to core nations’ trans-
portation and communication channels (Denning 2015). Similarly,
throughout the contributions to this volume, we can see examples of the
semiperipheral recalibration of peripheral and folkloric materials, whether
in discussions by Michael Niblett of Marlon James’ incorporation of inter-
medial genres from dancehall to gangster fiction to the yardie novel,
Matthew Eatough on the “translation of Xhosa culture” in South African
magical realism, Kerstin Oloff on the “monstrous turn” in Puerto Rican
fiction, Claire Westall on the transition from the subversive performances
of cricket as anti-colonial “playing back” to “neoliberal cricket accumula-
tion” in global crick lit, or Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado on the “neoliberal-
ization of Mexican cinema.”
If the neoliberal world-system is understood world-historically, then
the particular features of financialization and speculation, enclosure, accu-
mulation via dispossession and so forth that dominate this moment can be
seen to have historical antecedents in earlier phases of accumulation, par-
ticularly in what Giovanni Arrighi, using Fernand Braudel’s metaphor
(Braudel 1983: 246) has called the “autumn” of capital’s long cycles of
expanding and contracting accumulation, in which capitalists respond to
declining profit by reallocating capital from production to finance, and the
power of hegemonic complexes is challenged by emerging rivals (Arrighi
2002: 6). So too might these features be expected to have corollary cul-
tural forms that are different in their particularities but analogous in the
structural conditions that produce them, and even in the formal strategies
they adapt or reactivate from earlier moments to register those conditions.
As Braudel insisted, “It would be a mistake to imagine capitalism as some-

thing that developed in stages or leaps – from mercantile capitalism to
financial capitalism, with some regular progression from one phase to the
next. […] Despite everything that has been written about the liberal com-
petitive capitalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, monopoly is
by no means a thing of the past. It has simply taken on new forms” (1983:
621).
Giovanni Arrighi charts a powerfully suggestive approach to capital-
ism’s longue durée in The Long 20th Century, where he pursues “com-
parative analysis of successive systemic cycles of accumulation in an
attempt to identify […] patterns of recurrence and evolution” among
four systemic cycles of accumulation (2002: 6). These include “a Genoese
cycle, from the fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries; a Dutch
cycle, from the late sixteenth century through most of the eighteenth
century; a British cycle, from the latter half of the eighteenth century
through the early twentieth century; and a US cycle, which began in the
late nineteenth century and has continued into the current phase of
financial expansion” (7). Arrighi bases his cycles on “Marx’s general for-
mula of capital (MCM′)” as a “recurrent pattern of historical capitalism
as world system” (6). He argues that the central aspect of this pattern is
“the alternation of epochs of material expansion (MC phases of capital
accumulation) with phases of financial rebirth and expansion (CM′
phases)” which together constitute “a full systemic cycle of accumula-
tion (MCM′)” (6).
However, we have a central hesitation regarding Arrighi’s model, in
that what should be taken as an initial view into the complexities of the
world-system has become, in many of his followers’ hands, a machinic
reading devoid of class struggle. In this, we see three fundamental errors.
Firstly, the season metaphor has led some critics to assume a foreseeable
regularity and hence lazy predictability. Like Walter Benjamin’s descrip-
tion of Stalinist-era “historical materialism” as being like a mechanical
puppet that actually concealed a master chess-player who was supposed to
always win, these fully automated citations of Arrighi are more theological,
than analytical. They imply that all one needs to chart history is a calendar.
Yet critics from Marx to Braudel insist that history should be considered
as a dynamic logistic, not a mechanical schematic: “There is a tendency for
these great waves [of capitalist cyclicality] rolling in from the deep to
become shorter in length…a speeding up in the pace of history” (Braudel
1983: 78).
Secondly, a concomitant reduction occurs when using an overly simpli-

fied model of capital accumulation. Arrighi takes the MCM′ formula in
Capital Volume I as his template to explain world-history. Yet when Marx
himself began to broach his own discussion of the world market, the pre-
liminary equation was replaced in Capital Volume II with a more expanded
version involving the circuits of money and commodity capital, in addition
to the production capital that was only examined in Volume I. This was
the equation M-C…P…C′-M′. While this is not the place for a prolonged
exposition of the expanded scale of capital’s reproduction, it bears insist-
ing on the risks of misaligning a truncated exposition of capital from
Volume I, with the perspective of the world-system, for the former was
basically not designed for and cannot handle a useful discussion of the lat-
ter’s complex twists, nor can any other schematic of social or cultural his-
tory based on the reduced formula.
Here Braudel’s assertion of the need for a more multivariate typology
is useful. He suggests that the three “cases” of time involving an upward
trend, crisis, and downward trend have to be multiplied about Wallerstein’s
three “circles” of core, semiperiphery, and periphery, and that, in turn,
each of these nine situations has to be multiplied about “four social ‘sets’—
economics, politics, culture, and social hierarchy” to produce 36 distinc-
tive particularities (Braudel 1983: 85). Whether Braudel’s categories are
considered too many or too few(!), his larger point remains that a model
that only rests on three elements is simply not an adequate toolkit.
Lastly, an unfortunate legacy of Arrighi’s study has been the assump-
tion of sequential homogeneity, where each phase can be known as wholly
totalized by a single hegemon such as Britain, the United States, and so
forth. Wallerstein, who retains his importance as a key formulator of
world-systems theory, is absolutely clear that so neat a reduction is wrong:
Hegemony is a rare condition; to date only Holland, Great Britain, and the
United States have been hegemonic powers in the capitalist world-economy,
and each held the position for a relatively brief period […] The problem
with hegemony […] is that it is passing […] superiorities are successive, but
they overlap in time. Similarly, the loss of advantage [is] also largely succes-
sive. It follows that there is probably only a short moment in time […of]
hegemony. (Wallerstein 2011a: 38–9)
Furthermore, Wallerstein distinguishes between “two major cyclical pro-

cesses,” a Kondratieff cycle of “more or less fifty or sixty years in length-
cycles of expansion and stagnation in the world-economy as whole. The

second major cyclical process is a much slower one; it is the rise and demise
of hegemonic powers in the interstate system” (2011b: 276). Hence,
Wallerstein cautions against a too swift or too fixed linkage between capi-
talist rhythms and a particular nation-state’s hegemony, since even though
the “capitalist world-economy needs the states, needs the inter-state sys-
tem, and needs the periodic appearance of hegemonic powers…the prior-
ity for capitalists is never the maintenance, much less the glorification, of
any of these structures. The priority remains always the endless accumula-
tion of capital” (2004: 59). Finally, hegemony for Wallerstein typically
occurs after a “thirty years’ war” that “implicates all the major economic
loci of the world-system and have historically pitted an alliance grouped
around the putative constructor of a world-empire against an alliance
grouped around a putative hegemonic power” (58). Consequently, a less
static and overly mechanistic understanding of contemporary processes
than that provided by Arrighi’s epigones is necessary.
Such a world-systems inflected approach must not be so overdetermin-
ing of inter-state competition and the temporal cycles that shape the
world-system that it excludes analysis of modes of resistance-from-below
or to the forms of culture that can either call-into-being or challenge dif-
ferent accumulation regimes by stabilizing or destabilizing the realign-
ment of class formations and alliances. To the contrary, by rigorously
periodizing the accumulation regime, and restoring the repressed horizon
of capitalism’s long duration, while rejecting mere culturalism, a recuper-
ated cultural studies can very usefully teach us about aspects of neoliberal-
ism that economics and political journalism cannot or have not: exploring
the particular experience-systems, rationalities, bodily dispositions, socio-
ecological regimes, cultural genres and forms, and modes of political resis-
tance that mediate processes of neoliberalization, and the ways in which
cultural forms register, imagine, and make-history-from-below. Our con-
tributors address this whole range of affects and subjectivities, whether
Amy Rushton on the “neoliberal model of mental health” and those fic-
tional explorations of “suicidal depression” that are “productively
disruptive” of hegemonic ideology, Daniel Hartley on the uneven modali-
ties of “depersonalization and (re-)personalization” under neoliberal capi-
talism, Kerstin Oloff on the use of horror and grotesque aesthetics to
register socio-ecological degradation, Sharae Deckard on the “locomotive
consciousness” associated with African resource fictions and insurgency, or
Mathias Nilges on the role of neoliberal “cultural regulation” in produc-
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L E T T E R XXXI.
TO M R . R— — .
Oct. 18, 1775.
I BEGIN to fear with you that our friend L—— is sick or married—or
—what I would rather hope—is on his way to England.—Thanks to
our Suffolk friends—you take care we shall not starve.—I was for five
minutes, when dinner was on table, suspended, in inclination, like
the ass between the two loads of hay—the turtle pulled one way,
and a sweet loin of pork the other—I was obliged to attack both in
pure self-defence;—Mrs. Sancho eat—and praised the pork—and
praised the giver.—Let it not, my worthy R——, mortify thy pride—to
be obliged to divide praise with a pig; we all echoed her—O—— and
R—— were the toasts—I know not in truth two honester or better
men—were your incomes as enlarged as your hearts, you would be
the two greatest fortunes in Europe. But I wrote merely to thank you
—and to say Mrs Sancho and Mrs. M—— are both better than when
I wrote last night—in short, Mrs. M—— is quite well—I pray God to
send my dear Mrs. Sancho safe down and happily up—she makes
the chief ingredient of my felicity—whenever my good friend marries
—I hope he will find it the same with him—My best respects to
Mesdames C. and C. and take care of my brother.—I fear this will be
a raking week.—Compliments to Master S—— and the noble Mr. B
——.
Yours, &c.
I G N . SA N C H O.
L E T T E R XXXII.
TO M R . L— — .
Friday, Oct. 20, 1774.
IN obedience to my amiable friend’s request—I, with gratitude to

the Almighty—and with pleasure to her—(I am sure I am right)—
acquaint her, that my ever dear Dame Sancho was exactly at half
past one this afternoon delivered of a—child.—Mrs. Sancho, my dear
Miss L——, is as well as can be expected—in truth, better than I
feared she would be—for indeed she has been very unwell for this
month past—I feel myself a ton lighter:—In the morning I was crazy
with apprehension—and now I talk nonsense through joy.—This
plaguy scrawl will cost you I know not what—but it’s not my fault
—’tis your foolish godson’s—who, by me, tenders his dutiful
respects. I am ever yours to command, sincerely and affectionately,
I . SA N C H O.
L E T T E R XXXIII.
TO M I SS L— — .
Charles Street, Dec. 14, 1775.
THERE is something inexpressibly flattering in the notion of your

being warmer—from the idea of your much obliged friend’s caring
for you;—in truth we could not help caring about you—our thoughts
travelled with you over-night from Bond Street to the Inn.—The next
day at noon—“Well, now she’s above half way—alas! no, she will not
get home till Saturday night—I wonder what companions she has
met with—there is a magnetism in goodnature, which will ever
attract its like—so if she meets with beings the least social—but
that’s as chance wills!”—Well, night arrives—“And now our friend has
reached the open arms of parental love—excess of delightful
endearments gives place to tranquil enjoyments—and all are happy
in the pleasure they give each other!”—Were I a Saint or a Bishop,
and was to pass by your door, I would stop, and say, “Peace be upon
this dwelling!”—and what richer should I leave it?—for I trust, where
a good man dwells, there peace makes its sweet abode.—When you
have read Bossuet, you will find at the end, that it was greatly
wished the learned author had brought the work down lower—but I
cannot help thinking he concluded his design as far as he originally
meant.—Mrs. Sancho, thank Heaven, is as well as you left her, and
your godson thrives;—he is the type of his father—fat—heavy—
sleepy;—but as he is the head of the noble family, and your godson,
I ought not to disparage him.——The Dutchess of K—— is so unwell,
that she has petitioned for a longer day:—they say that her intellects
are hurt;—though a bad woman, she is entitled to pity.—Conscience,
the high chancellor of the human breast, whose small still voice
speaks terror to the guilty—Conscience has pricked her;—and, with
all her wealth and titles, she is an object of pity.—Health attend you
and yours!—Pleasure of course will follow.—Mrs. Sancho joins me in
all I say, and the girls look their assent.—I remain—God forgive me!
I was going to conclude, without ever once thanking you for your
goodness in letting us hear from you so early:—there is such a civil
coldness in writing, a month perhaps after expectation has been
snuffed out, that the very thought is enough to chill friendship;—but
you—like your sister Charity, as Thomson sweetly paints her (smiling
through tears)—delight in giving pleasure, and joy in doing good.—
And now farewell—and believe us, in truth, our dear Miss L——’s
obliged and grateful friends,
anne and i . s a n c h o.
L E T T E R XXXIV.
TO M R . M — — .
Jan. 4, 1776.
I KNOW not what predominates in my worthy friend—pride or good-

nature;—don’t stare—you have a large share of both:—happy it is for
you—as well as your acquaintance—that your pride is so well
accompanied by the honest ardor of youthful benevolence.—You
would, like the fabled pelican—feed your friends with your vitals.
Blessed Philanthropy!—Oh! the delights of making happy—the bliss
of giving comfort to the afflicted—peace to the distressed mind—to
prevent the request from the quivering lips of indigence!—But, great
God!—the inexpressible delight—the not-to-be-described rapture, in
soothing, and convincing the tender virgin that “You alone,” &c. &c.
&c. (Prior’s Henry and Emma see.)—But I think you dropt a word or
two about flattery.—Sir,—honest friend,—know, once for all—I never
yet thought you a coxcomb:—a man of sense I dare not flatter, my
pride forbids it;—a coxcomb is not worth the dirty pains.—You have
(through the bounty of your great Creator) strong parts, and, thank
the Almighty Goodness, an honest sincere heart;—yes, you have
many and rare talents, which you have cultivated with success:—you
have much fire, which, under the guidance of a circumspect
judgement, stimulates you to worthy acts;—but do not say that I
flatter in speaking the truth;—I can see errors even in those I half
reverence;—there are spots in the Sun—and perhaps some faults in
Johnny M——, who is by far too kind, generous, and friendly, to his
greatly obliged friend,
I G N . SA N C H O.
P. S. I tell you what—(are you not coming to town soon?)—F——

and venison are good things; but by the manes of my ancestors—I
had rather have the pleasure of gossipation with your sublime
highness.—What sketches have you taken?—What books have you
read?—What lasses gallanted?—The venison is exceeding fine, and
the cleanest I ever saw;—to-morrow we dress it;—a thankful heart
shall be our sweet sauce:—were you in town, your partaking of it
would add to its relish.—You say I was not in spirits when you saw
me at G——; why, it might be so—in spight of my philosophy—the
cares and anxieties attendant on a large family and small finances
sometimes overcloud the natural chearfulness of yours truly,
I . SA N C H O.
N. B. A very short P—— S——.

L E T T E R XXXV.
TO M R . R— — .
June 25, 1776.
YOU had a pleasant day for your journey—and after five or six miles
ride from town—you left the dust behind you;—of course the road
and the country also improved as you drew nearer B——. I will
suppose you there—and then I will suppose you found Mrs. C——
well in health, and the better for the preceding day’s motion;—she
and Miss C—— meet you with the looks of a Spring-morning—I see
you meet in fancy;—I wish I could see you in reality;—but of that
hereafter.—I want to know how Mrs. C—— does—and what Miss C
—— does;—what you intend to do—and what Mr. S—— will never
do.—This letter is a kind of much-ado-about—what—I must not say
nothing—because the ladies are mentioned in it.—Mr. and Mrs. B——
have a claim to my best respects.—Pray say what’s decent for me—
and to the respectable table also—beginning with my true friend
Mrs. C——, and then steering right and left—ending at last with your
worship. Tell Mrs. C—— that Kitty is as troublesome as ever; that
Billy gets heavier and stronger.—Mrs. Sancho remains, thank God,
very well—and all the rest ditto.—Let me know how you all do—and
how brother O—— does.—As to news, all I hear is about Wilkes;—he
will certainly carry his point—for Administration are all strongly in his
interest:—betts run much in his favor:—for my part, I really think he
will get it—if he can once manage so—as to gain the majority.—I
am, my dear R——, yours—(much more than Wilkes’s—or indeed
any man’s, O——’s excepted) in love and zeal,
Ever faithfully,
I . SA N C H O.
L E T T E R XXXVI.
TO M R . S T E R N E .
July, 1776.
REVEREND SIR,
IT would be an insult to your humanity (or perhaps look like it) to

aplogize for the liberty I am taking.—I am one of those people whom
the vulgar and illiberal call “Negurs.”—The first part of my life was
rather unlucky, as I was placed in a family who judged ignorance the
best and only security for obedience.—A little reading and writing I
got by unwearied application.—The latter part of my life has been—
through God’s blessing, truly fortunate, having spent it in the service
of the best families in the kingdom.—My chief pleasure has been
books.—Philanthropy I adore.—How very much, good Sir, am I
(amongst millions) indebted to you for the character of your amiable
uncle Toby!—I declare, I would walk ten miles in the dog-days, to
shake hands with the honest corporal.—Your Sermons have touched
me to the heart, and I hope have amended it, which brings me to
the point.—In your tenth discourse, page seventy-eight, in the
second volume—is this very affecting passage:—“Consider how great
a part of our species—in all ages down to this—have been trod
under the feet of cruel and capricious tyrants, who would neither
hear their cries, nor pity their distresses.—Consider slavery—what it
is—how bitter a draught—and how many millions are made to drink
it!”—Of all my favourite authors, not one has drawn a tear in favour
of my miserable black brethren—excepting yourself, and the humane
author of Sir George Ellison.—I think you will forgive me;—I am sure
you will applaud me for beseeching you to give one half-hour’s
attention to slavery, as it is at this day practised in our West Indies.
—That subject, handled in your striking manner, would ease the yoke
(perhaps) of many;—but if only of one—Gracious God!—what a feast
to a benevolent heart!—and, sure I am, you are an Epicurean in acts
of charity.—You, who are universally read, and as universally
admired—you could not fail.—Dear Sir, think in me you behold the
uplifted hands of thousands of my brother Moors.—Grief (you
pathetically observe) is eloquent;—figure to yourself their attitudes;
—hear their supplicating addresses!—Alas!—you cannot refuse.—
Humanity must comply—in which hope I beg permission to subscribe
myself,
Reverend Sir, &c.
I G N . SA N C H O.
L E T T E R XXXVII.
TO M R . M — — .
August 12, 1776.

“We have left undone the things we should have done,” &c. &c.——
THE general confession—with a deep sense of our own frailties—

joined to penitence—and strong intentions of better doing—insures
poor sinners forgiveness, obliterates the past, sweetens the present,
and brightens the future;—in short, we are to hope that it reconciles
us with the Deity;—and if that conclusion is just, it must certainly
reconcile us in part to each other.—Grant me that, dear M——, and
you have no quarrel towards me for epistolary omissions:—look
about you, my dear friend, with a fault-searching eye—and see what
you have left undone!—Look on your chair!—those cloaths should
have been brushed and laid by—that linen sent to wash—those
shoes to be cleaned.—Zooks! why you forget to say your prayers—to
take your physick—to wash your ——. Pray how does Mrs. H——?
Lord what a deal of rain! I declare I fear it will injure the harvest.—
And when saw you Nancy?—Has the cat kittened?—I suppose you
have heard the news:—great news!—a glorious affair! (and is two
ff’s necessary?)—O! Lord, Sir!—very little bloodshed—pity any should
—how!—do not you admire!—How so?—Why this, Sir, is writing, ’tis
the true sublime—and this the stuff that gives my friend M——
pleasure:—thou vile flatterer! blush! blush up to thine eyelids!—I am
happy to think I have found a flaw in thee:—thou art a flatterer of
the most dangerous sort, because agreeable.—I have often observed
—there is more of value in the manner of doing the thing—than in
the thing itself—my mind’s eye follows you in the selecting the pretty
box—in arranging the pickled fruit.—I see you fix on the lid, drive the
last nail, your countenance lit up with glee, and your heart exulting
in the pleasure you were about giving to the family of the Sancho’s—
and then snatch the hat and stick, and walk with the easy alacrity of
a soul conscious of good.—But hold, Sir, you were rather saucy in a
part or two of your letter:—for which reason I shall not thank you for
the fruit;—the good woman and brats may—and with reason; for
they devoured them: the box, indeed, is worth thanks; which, if
God, gout, and weather permit, you may probably hear something of
on Sunday next, from yours, with all your sins, &c. &c.
I G N . SA N C H O.
L E T T E R XXXVIII.
TO M R . K— — .
August 28, 1776
M Y W O RT H Y F R I E N D,
I SHOULD have answered your billet as soon as received—but I

wanted to know the quantum that I was to wish you joy of—as
nothing has yet for certainty transpired.—I will hope your legacy
from Mrs. —— is handsome:—you can easily imagine the pleasure I
felt—in finding she had so amply remembered poor Mrs. M——. That
one act has more true generosity in it, aye, and justice perhaps,
than any thing I ever knew of her in her long life:—it has removed
an anxiety from me which (in spite of self-felt poverty—and the
heart-felt cares of a large family) troubled me greatly;—as to myself,
she used to promise largely formerly, that she would think of me:—
as I never believed—I was not disappointed.—More and more
convinced of the futility of all our eagerness after worldly riches, my
prayer and hope is only for bread, and to be enabled to pay what I
owe. I labour up hill against many difficuties; but God’s goodness is
my support, and his word my trust.—Mrs. Sancho joins me in her
best wishes, and gives you joy also: the children are well—William
grows, and tries his feet briskly—and Fanny goes on well in her
tambour-work;—Mary must learn some business or other—if we can
possibly atchieve money;—but we have somehow no friends—and,
bless God!—we deserve no enemies. Trade is duller than ever I knew
it—and money scarcer;—foppery runs higher—and vanity stronger;—
extravagance is the adored idol of this sweet town.—You are a happy
being;—free from the cares of the world in your own person—you
enjoy more than your master—or his master into the bargain.—May
your comforts know no diminution, but increase with your years!—
and may the same happen, when it shall please God, to your sincere
friend I. Sancho and his family!
L E T T E R XXXIX.
TO M R . M — — .
September 1, 1776.
YOU have the happiest manner of obliging!—How comes it that—

without the advantages of a twentieth generationship of noble blood
flowing uncontaminated in your veins—without the customary three
years dissipation at college—and the (nothing to be done without)
four years perambulation on the Continent—without all these needful
appendages—with little more than plain sense—sheer good-nature—
and a right honest heart—thou canst—
“Like low-born Allen, with an aukward shame,

“Do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame!”
Now, by my grandame’s beard—I will not thank you for your

present—although my ears have been stunned with your goodness
and kindness—the best young man!—and, good Lord! how shall we
make him amends? &c. &c.—Pshaw! simpleton, quoth I, do you not
plainly ken, that he himself has a satisfaction in giving pleasure to
his friends, which more than repays him?—so I strove to turn off the
notion of obligation—though, I must confess, my heart at the same
time felt a something—sure it was not envy—no, I detest it—I fear it
was pride—for I feel within myself this moment, that I could turn the
tables in repaying principal with treble interest—I should feel
gratified—though perhaps not satisfied.—I have a long account to
balance with you—about your comments upon the transcript:—you
are a pretty fellow, to dare put in your claim—to better sense—
deeper thinking—and stronger reasoning than my wise self.—To tell
you the truth (though at my own expence) I read your letter the first
time with some little chagrin;—your reasoning, though it hurt my
pride—yet almost convinced my understanding.—I read it carefully a
second time—pondered—weighed—and submitted—Whenever a
spark of vanity seems to be glowing at my heart—I will read your
letter—and what then?—Why then, humbled by a proper sense of
my inferiority, I shall still have cause for pride—triumph—and
comfort—when I reflect that my valued Censor—is the true friend of
his sincerely affectionate
I G N . SA N C H O.
L E T T E R XL.
TO M R . M — — .
Dec. 4, 1776.
I FORGOT to tell you this morning—a jack-ass would have shewn

more thought—(are they rationals or not?)—the best recipe for the
gout, I am informed—is two or three stale Morning-Posts;—reclined
in easy chair—the patient must sit—and mull over them—take snuff
at intervals—hem—and look wise;—I apply to you as my
pharmacopolist—do not criticize my orthography—but, when
convenient, send me the medicine—which, with care and thanks, I
will return.
Yours,
Dismal s a n c h o.
Pray how do you do?

L E T T E R XLI.
[4]
TO M R . M — — .
January 4, 1777.
I HAVE read, but have found nothing of the striking kind of

sentimental novelty—which I expected from its great author—the
language is good in most places—but never rises above the common
pitch.—In many of our inferior tragedies—I have ever found here
and there a flower strewn, which has been the grace and pride of
the poetic parterre, and has made me involuntarily cry out, Bravo!—
From dress—scenery—action—and the rest of play-house garniture—
it may shew well and go down—like insipid fish with good sauce;—
the Prologue is well—the Epilogue worth the whole—such is my
criticism—read—stare—and conclude your friend mad—though a
more Christian supposition would be—what’s true at the same time
—that my ideas are frozen, much more frigid than the play;—but
allowing that—and although I confess myself exceeding cold, yet I
have warmth enough to declare myself yours sincerely,
I . SA N C H O.
Love and many happy new years to the ladies.

[4] On reading the Tragedy of Semiramis, from the French of Mons.
Voltaire.
L E T T E R XLII.
TO M R . M — — .
February 9, 1777.
ZOUNDS! if alive—what ails you? if dead—why did you not send me

word?—Where’s my Tristram?—What, are all bucks alike!—all
promise, and no—but I won’t put myself in a passion—I have but
one foot, and no head—go-to—why, what a devil of a rate dost thou
ride at anathematizing and reprobating poor ——! pho! thou
simpleton—he deserves thy pity—and whoever harbours a grain of
contempt for his fellow-creatures—either in the school of poverty or
misfortune—that Being is below contempt—and lives the scorn of
men—and shame of devils.—Thou shalt not think evil of ——; nor
shall he, either by word or thought, dispraisingly speak or think of M
——.
In regard to thy N——, thou art right—guard her well—but chiefly
guard her from the traitor in her own fair breast, which, while it is
the seat of purity and unsullied honor—fancies its neighbours to be
the same—nor sees the serpent in the flowery foliage—till it stings—
and then farewell sweet peace and its attendant riches.
I have only time to thank you for the leaves, and to lament your
want of perspicuity in writing.—My love to George when you see him
—and two loves to Nancy—tell her I could fold her to my bosom with
the same tender pressure I do my girls—shut my eyes—draw her to
my heart—and call her Daughter!—and thou, monkey-face, write me
a decent letter—or you shall have another trimming from yours,
I . SA N C H O.
Look’ye Sir, I write to the ringing of the shop-door bell—I write—

betwixt serving—gossiping—and lying. Alas! what cramps to poor
genius!
For T H E G E N E R A L A D V E R T I S E R.
The outline of a plan for establishing a most respectable body of Seamen to
the number 20,000, to be ever ready for the manning a fleet upon
twelve days notice.
THE proposer is humbly of opinion, that his plan is capable of many

wholesome improvements, which he thinks would prove no
unprofitable study, even to the Lords of the Admiralty.
Ist, Let the number of seamen, now upon actual service, be each
man inrolled upon his Majesty’s books, at the rate of 5l. per annum
for life; let them also receive the same quarterly, or half-yearly, upon
personal application.
IIdly, Let books be opened for them in all his Majesty’s different
yards and sea ports, and there their dwelling, age, time they have
served, &c. to be fairly entered; each man to bring a certificate from
his ship, signed by the captain, or some one he shall please to
depute.
IIIdly, As an encouragement to his Majesty’s service and

population at the same time, let there be instituted in each of the
ship-yards, or ports, &c. of these Kingdoms, a kind of asylum, or
house of refuge, for the sons of these honest tars, to be received
therein at the age of six years; there to be taught navigation, or,
after the common school learning, to be bound to such parts of ship-
building as they by nature are most inclined to; such as chuse sea
service, to be disposed on board his Majesty’s ships at fifteen years
old, and to be enrolled upon the pension-books after ten years
faithful service, unless better provided for.
Might not there be some plan hit on to employ the daughters, as

well as sons of poor sailors? Does not our Fisheries (if they should
ever happen to be attended to) open many doors of useful
employment for both sexes?
To defray the above, I would advise the following methods:
First, The pension of 5l. per man for 20,000, amounts only to
100,000l.: let this be taken from the Irish list; it will surely be better
employed, than in the present mode for Pensioners of noble blood.
Secondly, Let the book and office keepers at the different yards,
ports, &c. be collected from under-officers who have served with
reputation; it will be a decent retreat for them in the evening of life,
and only a grateful reward for past service.
May some able hand, guided by a benevolent heart, point out
and strongly recommend something of this sort, that the honoured
name of England may be rescued from the scandalous censure of
man-stealing, and from the ingratitude also of letting their
preservers perish in the time of peace!
I am, Sir, yours, &c.
Africanus.
L E T T E R XLIII.
TO M R . M — — .
July 27, 1777.
GO-TO!—the man who visits church twice in one day, must either
be religious—curious—or idle—whichever you please, my dear
friend;—turn it the way which best likes you, I will cheerily subscribe
to it.—By the way, H——n was inspired this morning; his text was
from Romans—chapter the—verse the—both forgot;—but the
subject was to present heart, mind, soul, and all the affections—a
living sacrifice to God;—he was most gloriously animated, and
seemed to have imbibed the very spirit and manners of the Great
Apostle. Our afternoon Orator was a stranger to me—he was blest
with a good, clear, and well-toned articulate voice:—he preached
from the Psalms—and took great pains to prove that God knew more
than we—that letters were the fountain of our knowledge—that a
man in Westminster was totally ignorant of what was going forward
in Whitechapel—that we might have some memory of what we did
last week—but have no sort of conjecture of what we shall do to-
morrow, &c. &c.—Now H——n’s whole drift was, that we should live
the life of angels here—in order to be so in reality hereafter:—the
other good soul gave us wholesome matter of fact;—they were both
right—(but I fear not to speak my mind to my M——, who, if he
condemns my head, will, I am sure, acquit my heart.)—You have
read and admired Sterne’s Sermons—which chiefly inculcate practical
duties, and paint brotherly love—and the true Christian charities—in
such beauteous glowing colours—that one cannot help wishing to
feed the hungry—cloathe the naked, &c. &c.—I would to God, my
friend, that the great lights of the church would exercise their
oratorical powers upon Yorick’s plan:—the heart and passions once
listed under the banners of blest philanthropy—would naturally
ascend to the redeeming God—flaming with grateful rapture.—Now I
have observed among the modern Saints—who profess to pray
without ceasing—that they are so fully taken up with pious
meditations—and so wholy absorbed in the love of God—that they
have little if any room for the love of man:—if I am wrong, tell me so
honestly—the censure of a friend is of more value than his money—
and to submit to conviction, is a proof of good sense.—I made my
bow to-night to Mrs. H——; the rest of the rogues were out—bright-
eyed S—— and all.—Mrs. H—— says that you are hypped—
nonsense!—few can rise superior to pain—and the head, I will allow,
is a part the most sensible, if affected;—but even then you are not
obliged to use more motion than you like—though I can partly feel
the aukward sensations and uneasy reflections, which will often arise
upon the least ail of so precious a member as the eye—yet certain I
am, the more you can be master of yourself (I mean as to
chearfulness, if not gaiety of mind) the better it will of course be
with you.—I hope G—— is well—and that you ride often to see him I
make no doubt.—I like the monkey—I know not for why, nor does it
signify a button—but sure he is good-tempered and grateful;—but
what’s that to me?—Good-night:——the clock talks of eleven.
Yours, &c.
I . SA N C H O.
L E T T E R XLIV.
TO M R . M — — .
July 23, 1777.
YES—too true it is—for the many (aye, and some of those many
carry their heads high) too true for the miserable—the needy—the
sick—for many, alas! who now may have no helper—for the child of
folly poor S——, and even for thy worthless friend Sancho.—It is too
true, that the Almighty has called to her rich reward—she who,
whilst on earth, approved herself his best delegate.—How blind, how
silly, is the mortal who places any trust or hope in aught but the
Almighty!—You are just, beautifully just, in your sketch of the
vicissitudes of worldly bliss.—We rise the lover—dine the husband—
and too oft, alas! lay down the forlorne widower.—Never so struck in
my life;—it was on Friday night, between ten and eleven, just
preparing for my concluding pipe—the Duke of M——’s man knocks.
—“Have you heard the bad news?”—No.—“The Dutchess of
Queensbury died last night!”—I felt fifty different sensations—
unbelief was uppermost—when he crushed my incredibility, by
saying he had been to know how his Grace did—who was also very
poorly in health.—Now the preceding day, Thursday (the day on
which she expired) I had received a very penitential letter from S
——, dated from St. Helena;—this letter I inclosed in a long tedious
epistle of my own—and sent to Petersham, believing the family to be
all there.—The day after you left town her Grace died;—that day
week she was at my door—the day after I had the honour of a long
audience in her dressing-room.—Alas! this hour blessed with health
—crowned with honors—loaded with riches, and encircled with
friends—the next reduced to a lump of poor clay—a tenement for
worms!—Earth re-possesses part of what she gave—and the freed
spirit mounts on wings of fire:—her disorder was a stoppage—she
fell ill the evening of the Friday that I last saw her—continued in her
full senses to the last.—The good she had done reached the skies
long before her lamented death—and are the only heralds that are
worth the pursuit of wisdom:—as to her bad deeds, I have never
heard of them.—Had it been for the best, God would have lent her a
little longer to a foolish world, which hardly deserved so good a
woman;—for my own part, I have lost a friend—and perhaps ’tis
better so.—“Whatever is,” &c. &c.—I wish S—— knew this heavy
news, for many reasons.—I am inclined to believe her Grace’s death
is the only thing that will most conduce to his reform.—I fear neither
his gratitude nor sensibility will be much hurt upon hearing the news
—it will act upon his fears, and make him do right upon a base
principle.—Hang him! he teazes me whenever I think of him.—I
supped last night with St——; he called in just now, and says he has
a right to be remembered to you.—You and he are two old monkeys
—the more I abuse and rate you, the better friend you think me.—As
you have found out that your spirits govern your head—you will of
course contrive every method of keeping your instrument in tune;—
sure I am that bathing—riding—walking—in succession—the two
latter not violent—will brace your nerves—purify your blood—
invigorate its circulation:—add to the rest continency—yes, again I
repeat it, continency;—before you reply, think—re-think—and think
again—look into your Bible—look in Young—peep into your own
breast—if your heart warrants what your head counsels—act then
boldly.—Oh! apropos—pray thank my noble friend Mrs. H—— for her
friendly present of C— J—; it did Mrs. Sancho service, and does poor
Billy great good—who has (through his teeth) been plagued with a
cough—which I hope will not turn to the whooping sort;—the girls
greet you as their respected school-master.—As to your spirited kind
offer of a F——, why when you please—you know what I intend
doing with it.
Poor Lady S——, I find, still lingers this side the world.—Alas!
when will the happy period arrive, that the sons of mortality may
greet each other with the joyful news, that sin, pain, sorrow, and
death, are no more; skies without clouds, earth without crimes, life
without death, world without end!—peace, bliss, and harmony,
where the Lord God—All in all—King of kings—Lord of lords—
reigneth—omnipotent—for ever—for ever!—may you, dear M——,
and all I love—yea the whole race of Adam, join with my unworthy
weak self, in the stupendous—astonishing—soul-cheering
Hallelujahs!—where Charity may be swallowed up in Love—Hope in
Bliss—and Faith in glorious Certainty!—We will mix, my boy, with all
countries, colours, faiths—see the countless multitudes of the first
world—the myriads descended from the—Ark—the Patriarchs—Sages
—Prophets—and Heroes! My head turns round at the vast idea! we
will mingle with them, and try to untwist the vast chain of blessed
Providence—which puzzles and baffles human understanding. Adieu.

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More information about this series at

New Comparisons in World Literature

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018965469

Cover illustration: creativesunday2016 / Getty Images

1 World-Culture and the Neoliberal World-­System: An

2 The Long 1970s: Neoliberalism, Narrative Form, and

3 From “Section 936” to “Junk”: Neoliberalism, Ecology,

4 Mont Neoliberal Periodization: The Mexican “Democratic

5 Cricket’s Neoliberal Narratives: Or the World of

6 Keeping It Real: Literary Impersonality Under

7 The Cultural Regulation of Neoliberal Capitalism157

8 Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite: Monetized War,

9 A Bubble in the Vein: Suicide, Community, and the

10 Futures, Inc.: Fiction and Intellectual Property in the

11 Trains, Stone, and Energetics: African Resource Culture

Sharae Deckard is Lecturer in World Literature at University College

Daniel Hartley is Assistant Professor in World Literatures in English at

Stephen Shapiro teaches in the Department of English and Comparative

World-Culture and the Neoliberal World-­

Sharae Deckard and Stephen Shapiro

The Problem of Neoliberalism

© The Author(s) 2019 1

Features of neoliberalism include state deregulation of markets, privati-

Neoliberalism is commonly used in at least five different ways in the study of

As an academic paradigm referring to cultural production, the descriptor

culture” focus instead on the cultural or ideological symptoms of neoliber-

“hinge” or “Sattelzeit” period (Kennedy and Shapiro 2019). The first

The Neoliberal World-System

1. a world-historical perspective of the nested temporalities of capital-

Crucially, this constellation of world-literary methodologies moves

core-periphery tension, such that there is some form of unequal exchange

one another is untenable in the context of neoliberal world-culture, and

defined by a trilogy of ideal-typical economies: superindustrial (coastal East

[The semiperiphery] receives, monetarizes, and forwards two kinds of com-

Semiperipheries exist simultaneously in core nations, like the United

Consequently, we argue that the semiperipheries are the zones where

As Braudel insisted, “It would be a mistake to imagine capitalism as some-

Secondly, a concomitant reduction occurs when using an overly simpli-

Furthermore, Wallerstein distinguishes between “two major cyclical pro-

cycles of expansion and stagnation in the world-economy as whole. The

Oct. 18, 1775.

Friday, Oct. 20, 1774.

IN obedience to my amiable friend’s request—I, with gratitude to

Charles Street, Dec. 14, 1775.

THERE is something inexpressibly flattering in the notion of your

I KNOW not what predominates in my worthy friend—pride or good-

P. S. I tell you what—(are you not coming to town soon?)—F——

N. B. A very short P—— S——.

1 World-Culture and the Neoliberal World-System: An

2 The Long 1970s: Neoliberalism, Narrative Form, and

3 From “Section 936” to “Junk”: Neoliberalism, Ecology,

4 Mont Neoliberal Periodization: The Mexican “Democratic

5 Cricket’s Neoliberal Narratives: Or the World of

6 Keeping It Real: Literary Impersonality Under

7 The Cultural Regulation of Neoliberal Capitalism157

8 Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite: Monetized War,

9 A Bubble in the Vein: Suicide, Community, and the

10 Futures, Inc.: Fiction and Intellectual Property in the

11 Trains, Stone, and Energetics: African Resource Culture

World-Culture and the Neoliberal World-