Terminal Crisis?

From the Worlding of American Literature to World-System Literature

Leerom Medovoi*
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The problem is to nd a central gure in whose life all the important extremes of the world of the novel converge and around whom a complete world with all its vital contradictions can be organized.

cs, Narrate or Describe Georg Luka I felt as though a world had ended.

Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Has the American novel become worldier since 9/11? Has the force of the World Trade Center attacks led writers toward a sustained inspection of Americas relationship to the rest of the globe? Bruce Robbins, looking at a broad range of contemporary novels, says no. The post-9/11 novel does a number of things instead: it becomes disoriented, retreats into domesticity, or (at best) treats an outside world of unmitigated suffering and absurdity that justies immigration in a coming to America narrative. All in all, Robbins nds mistaken the gently self-congratulatory proposition that the American novel has become more global in its perspective, and in that sense more worldly (1096).
*

Leerom Medovoi teaches English at Portland State University and directs the Portland Center for Public Humanities. He is the author of Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity (2005) and writes on war, globalization, biopolitics, and age in American culture.

American Literary History, vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 643 659 doi:10.1093/alh/ajr022 Advance Access publication July 26, 2011 # The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com

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This essay considers one revealing exception, Mohsin Hamids recent novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), which appears to have succeeded in becoming worldly in Robbinss sense. Hamids work of ction replies directly and cleverly to George W. Bushs question, why do they hate us? even while exploring the reverse (if asymmetrical) question, why do we fear them? In the process, the novel layers the complex, contradictory relationships to the US that the world bears: as a means to personal upward mobility, a center of global nance capital, a dangerous imperial power, an object of romantic attachment, and nally, an object of intelligible hatred. The point of this essay is less to show that there are exceptions to Robbinss rule than to explore the peculiar kind of novel that offers such worldliness today, and to consider what this teaches us about the historical conjuncture of our moment. I argue that contemplating The Reluctant Fundamentalist as a worldly American novel leads to a substantive revision of both what we mean by world and what we mean by American in the context of post-9/11 literature. Making reference to Giovanni Arrighis illuminating world-economic analyses, I suggest that Hamids novel belongs to a current mode of world literature engaged by the transitional moment associated with Arrighis sense of the terminal crisis in American world-system hegemony (57). The worldliness of The Reluctant Fundamentalist thus appears anomalous if held alongside some of the conventionally national American novels considered by Robbins, such as Don DeLillos Falling Man (2007) or Claire Messuds The Emperors Children (2006). But it would seem paradigmatic when read in the light of other contemporary world novels that have engaged Americas shifting global position, such as Aravind Adigas The White Tiger (2008) or Salman Rushdies Shalimar the Clown (2006).1 In what sense is it meaningful to call The Reluctant Fundamentalist an American novel? Does every novel written about the US by someone who has spent time there meet this description? From a biographical perspective, it is true that Hamids family moved to the US when he was a child and that he attended both college and law school here. Hamids career as a writer began with his undergraduate studies at Princeton, where he counted such luminous American authors as Joyce Carol Oates and Toni Morrison among his teachers. A critic who classies literature according to the authors biographically indicated nationality would thus have some reason to consider Hamid as American. Certain textual features of The Reluctant Fundamentalist align with such a designation. The bulk of the narrative, for instance, takes place in the US and features a narrator-protagonist who

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struggles with the personal and social costs of immigration to America, as do characters in a certain tradition of American novels that runs from Abraham Cahans The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) to Chang-rae Lees Native Speaker (2002) and Julia Alvarezs How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991). Yet this approach quickly runs into problems. It is not only that Hamid is a native-born Pakistani, but that he continues to live at least half of the time in the city of Lahore. Much of his remaining time is spent in London, and his passports are Pakistani and British. His rst novel, Moth Smoke (2000), which is set entirely in Pakistan, achieved fame as a pioneering representation of a hip, urban South Asia, morally unhinged and plugged into the global circuits of nance, mass media, and drug culture. Tremendously popular across the subcontinent, Moth Smoke was even adapted for Pakistani TV. While The Reluctant Fundamentalist spends more narrative time in the US than anywhere else, it is textually organized by a framing device that ultimately makes it uncontainable by the genre of the American immigrant novel. Written in an extremely unlikely direct address to a listener hailed throughout in the second person, Reluctant positions the reader as an American visitor to Pakistan who, while there, listens to a Pakistani man narrate his memories of America. If anything, The Reluctant Fundamentalist could be said to invert the immigrant narrative by having the protagonist explain why he left the US. This essay takes as its point of departure the proposition that our reading of Hamids novel only suffers if we prioritize the question of its potential inclusion in or exclusion from the corpus of American (or Pakistani) literature. Far more interesting and productive is the nonidentitarian question that we might pose instead: how does The Reluctant Fundamentalist cognitively, imaginatively, and affectively map a world in which Pakistan orbits around the US in a larger global system of wealth, culture, and power? To ask this latter question is to nudge literary and cultural criticism in the direction of analyzing, in place of American literature, what I will be calling world-system literature about America and its global position. The Reluctant Fundamentalist begins with an American who, wandering through the marketplace of Lahore, Pakistan, fatefully encounters a Pakistani man. Changez, the Pakistani, immediately recognizing the reader-surrogates American nationality, invites him to a cup of tea, confesses to having his own personal history in the US, and launches into a lengthy, increasingly ominous ashback narration of those years. Changez explains that he attended Princeton, from which he graduated near the top of his class. He was then hired for a prestigious entry-level job with the New York

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valuations rm, Underwood Samson (US), while simultaneously falling into a drawn-out relationship with a beautiful but melancholic and emotionally scarred American woman. Even these bare outlines indicate how freighted his story will be. Changezs exuberantly successful path toward integration into America, both at work and in love, loses its way almost exactly to the day of the September 11th attacks, when, watching the images on the television, he unexpectedly experiences an initial reaction of being remarkably pleased by the sheer symbolism of someone having so visibly brought America to her knees (72, 73). For his fragile girlfriend, Erica, the attacks trigger an acute regression into a state of unrelieved depression. She becomes institutionalized, never to return home. Growing increasingly hostile and sullen at Underwood Samson, Changez is eventually red and returns home to Pakistan, where, we ultimately learn, he becomes a university teacher who supports radical political movements, perhaps even fomenting terrorist acts. Interruptions break this long ashback at the start and end of every chapter, so that we return again and again to the scene of the increasingly darkening Lahore marketplace, where our anonymous and silent American surrogate grows increasingly agitated and distrustful of a narrator so bent on confessing the genesis of his anger and contempt for an America that he has come to see as a callous and brutalizing empire. At the same time, Changez himself grows increasingly cognizant that their meeting may not be an accident at all and that his American interlocutor is there perhaps to assassinate him. The relationship that The Reluctant Fundamentalist actually bears to America thus nds formal expression in its narrative structure: Hamids novel is not so much of or by, but rather for Americans. That is to say, America serves as the novels geopoliti tre and as the object of its rhetorical design rather cal raison de than as its generative cultural ground. The story of how the narratee responds to the narrators story thus takes the form of a bi-national allegory, personifying an America confronted with an opportunity to grasp for the rst time the actual nature of its relationship to Pakistan. We have few productive rubrics with which to analyze such a novel. To be sure, Hamid could be thought of as a migrant writer who has composed what Rebecca Walkowitz has termed comparison literature, works that compare locales across the contemporary globes transnational networks (536).2 But even so exible a category as Walkowitzs is ultimately of limited help, both because it would need to account for the allegorical register, but also because Hamids novel is quite careful not to devolve into

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an isolated cultural transaction or binary comparison between Pakistan and the US. I will return later to a fuller consideration of The Reluctant Fundamentalists allegorical designs and the purposes they serve, but for now I want to emphasize the consistently triangular logic of the novels comparative work. Changez has two recurring doubles in the novelhis boss Jim (originally from a poor, working-class Midwestern family) and his Caribbean colleague Wainwright, both of whom ( precisely because they are from elsewhere) push the reader away from Changezs Pakistani particularitieshis familys shabby gentility and Islamic secularitytoward a more structural account of his predicament. Even more decisively, it is on his two business trips to third spaces that Changez actually learns how to locate both the US and Pakistan on a properly cognitive world map. Changezs respective interactions with a Filipino driver in Manila and a literary bookseller in Valparaiso, both important (yet historically very different) sites of American imperial history, come to triangulate his migrancy and recast its worldly meaning. Changezs encounter with the Filipino driver occurs in the wake of the humiliation he feels when he rst sees that Manila, slums and poverty notwithstanding, is also a place of skyscrapers and superhighways with a glittering skyline and walled enclaves for the ultra-rich that embodies innitely more wealth than his home town of Lahore (64). It is one thing for New York to be richer than Lahore, but quite another to swallow the fact that Manila was as well (64). Changez responds by doing something he has never done before: I attempted to act and speak, as much as my dignity would permit, more like an American. The Filipinos we worked with seemed to look up to my American colleagues, accepting them almost instinctively as members of the ofcer class of global businessand I wanted my share of that respect as well (65). In lieu of any cultural specicity, Americanness here signies the tremendous power of global capital itself. What appeals to Changez is knowing my team was shaping the future. Would these workers be red? Would these CDs be made elsewhere? We, indirectly of course, would help decide (66). Only days later, however, while in a car with his colleagues, he accidentally meets the gaze of the Filipino driver of a jeepney whom he observes looking at him with undisguised hostility (66). Immediately perturbed, Changez ponders explanations for the mans anger, each of which assumedas their unconscious starting pointthat he and I shared a sort of Third World sensibility (67). And as Changez turns to address one of his American colleagues, he sees his fair hair and light eyes and, most of all, his oblivious immersion in the minutiae of our work

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and thought, you are so foreign. I felt in that moment much closer to the Filipino driver than to him; I felt I was play-acting when in reality I ought to be making my way home, like the people on the street outside (67). The Manila scenes employ what is ultimately an instructive inversion. At rst, Changezs decision to act more American is motivated by the gap between a Pakistan entirely marginalized by the world economy and the emerging economy of a successfully globalizing Philippines. Changezs rst affective response can thus be described as a Pakistani-identied jealousy of what worldsystems theory terms the semi-peripheral status of the Philippines. He acts American so that he can put the Philippines in the same position of shameful supplication that he wishes to disavow regarding his homeland. However, as soon as he encounters a Filipino who expresses hatred for his American status, Changezs identication quickly vacillates to the side of the apparent victims of the power he has come to embody. Just as Changez becomes American through the mediation of an emergent Filipino rst world, so he becomes Pakistani again by way of the Filipino third world. On both sides of this process, this sense of being either Pakistani or American represents ones ambivalent affective relationship to a structural position in the global economy. During the nal business trip to Valparaiso, Changez experiences an even more intense moment of triangulated reidentication. By this point, Changez has become utterly alienated from Underwood Samson, as well as America more generally, even teetering on the edge of resigning his post. All his labors on behalf of realizing a nancial future, Changez realizes, gives no thought to the critical personal and political issues that affect ones emotional present (145). Now months after the September 11th attacks, Pakistan has entered a terrifying state of crisis and heightened military alert. In the wake of the subsequent Parliament attack, India threatens to invade from the east, while the US bombing of Afghanistan has already commenced to the west. Trying to do his valuations job, Changez reports that my blinders were coming off, and I was dazzled and rendered immobile by the sudden broadening of my arc of vision (145). This arc of vision is nothing less than the world itself coming into view, precipitated by a second fateful encounter, this time with the Chilean bookseller Juan-Bautista, whose literary division in a larger publishing enterprise is directly threatened by Underwood Samsons valuations project. Changezs task in Valparaiso is to conrm that it would be nancially expedient for Juan-Bautistas department to be shut down as a means of

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increasing the transnational holding rms bottom line. True to his name, Juan-Bautista baptizes Changez into an altogether new life with a single deft observation: he invites Changez to compare his work at Underwood Samson with that of the medieval Ottoman empires janissaries, Christian boys captured at a young age who were trained to be soldiers in a Muslim army, at that time the greatest army in the world. They were ferocious and utterly loyal: they had fought to erase their own civilizations, so they had nothing else to turn to (151). Bautistas analogy triggers a blinding insight that entirely reframes for Changez his life in the US: I was a modern-day janissary, a servant of the American empire at a time when it was invading a country with a kinship to mine and was perhaps even colluding to ensure that my own country faced the threat of war. Of course I was struggling! Of course I felt torn! I had thrown in my lot with the men of Underwood Samson, with the ofcers of the empire, when all along I was predisposed to feel compassion for those like Juan-Bautista, whose lives the empire thought nothing of overturning for its own gain (152). Where does this narrative trajectory leave us? To begin with, it claries why Hamids novel should be viewed, neither as immigrant ction nor even as the comparison literature of the migrant writer, a category that does little to ensure relevant considerations of global power and economy. Hamids novel explicitly asks to be read as the literature of imperial critique, therefore less analogous to Alvarezs Garcia Girls and perhaps more to Conrads Heart of Darkness, a work of ction that employs for its metropolitan readership the human damage lying at the opposite end of their pillaged happiness. Hamids novel explicitly invites this comparison to Conrads ction in its closing pages when, as it begins to appear that the American (whose position we inhabit) may well be an undercover US assassin: Changez observes that he has felt quite like a Kurtz waiting for his Marlowe (183). One important trend in American literary scholarship since 9/ 11, indeed as far back as the rst Iraq war, has been precisely this turn from the study of a national literature to the literature of an empire. Particularly in the work of Donald Pease, John Carlos Rowe, and Amy Kaplan, a domain of study has come into view that we might call the literatures of the American imperium.3 While its focus often could be pushed even further beyond the national model, the promise at least is that we would need to read so-called American literature alongside the literary and cultural productions of all peoples who have fallen under the sway of the US imperium, while also acknowledging what is unexceptional about the literatures of American empire, namely how they can be

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read for their similarity to the literatures of other imperial formations, settler colonialisms, or overland empires. Even as The Reluctant Fundamentalist asks to be read within this anti-imperial frame, it exhibits symptoms that could compel a more complicated reading of its geopolitical unconscious. To begin with, the novel presents a recurring tension between the economic power of capital and brute military force. Changez tends to embody this distinction in the multiracial global city on the one hand, and the ultimately xenophobic national imperium on the other. As Changez recalls in a homage to Manhattan: In a subway car, my skin would typically fall in the middle of the color spectrum. On street corners, tourists would ask me for directions. I was in four and a half years, never an American; I was immediately a New Yorker. What? My voice is rising? You are right. I tend to become sentimental when I think of that city (33). Changezs sentimentality suggests how both emotional life and nance capital in this novel operate according to a common logic of investment. New York is, for Changez, as global and worldly as capital itself, respecting no borders among nations, peoples, or color lines. He strongly associates the city with Underwood Samson itself, not least for the diverse meritocracy of his incoming group of junior valuators, which includes both women and men, a Pakistani and a Caribbean black Jamaican. Because capital is meritocratic, owing always to the place or person that promises the greatest return, it does not play favorites. As Changezs boss Jim tells him, the economy is an animal that evolves. In his fathers day, America had focused on manufacturing, on muscle. But now all the blood was rushing to its brain. Says Jim, Thats where I wanted to be. In nance. In the coordination business. And thats where you are. Youre blood brought from some part of the body that the species doesnt need anymore. The tailbone. Like me. We came from places that were wasting away.. . . Most people dont recognize that kid. . . . They try to resist change. Power comes from becoming change (97). At this point, we cannot help noticing that our protagonists name might associate him with this kind of change, the economic law of capitals movement from less to more protable global spaces. Changez notes that he is uncomfortable with one thing implied by this vision: the legitimation of Pakistans atrophy. To invest himself in the nancial system of Underwood Samson means simultaneously to disinvest in Pakistan in both senses. Only tacitly does the novel here suggest that this go-with-the-economic-change argument justies too the deindustrialization of (and disinvestment in) the blue-collar American world of Jims own father. Pakistan is like Americas rust belt, a place from which the blood of nance is owing away as it

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seeks better returns. Jims embrace of Underwood Samson thus means that he has abandoned his own lial commitments in much the manner he expects Changez to give up on Pakistan. When planes strike on 9/11, however, a change occurs that is not simply more of the redeployment of capital such as Jim celebrates. The metaphoric blood ows of nance associated with the global city now give way to a military exercise of power, a redirection of capital that will shed real blood: Your countrys ag invaded New York after the attacks; it was everywhere. . . . They all seemed to proclaim: We are Americanot New York, which in my opinion, means something quite differentthe mightiest civilization the world has ever known; you have slighted us; beware our wrath. Gazing up at the soaring towers of the city, I wondered what manner of host would sally forth from so grand a castle (79). In Changezs account, a nationalist form of military power effectively overwhelms that of nance capital. America rst invades New York, before it turns its attention abroad to the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and later Iraq. The soaring towers that had earlier signaled New Yorks glory as the seat of capital, and whose equivalent skyscrapers in Manila had represented the growing Filipino share in nancial ows, now become a warlike castle seeking vengeance. These passages allow us to discern a dialectical tension that operates within the conception of imperial power, one in which misalignment between capital and empire, money and guns, becomes not only possible, but as recent work in world-systems theory has argued, perhaps historically inevitable in moments of transition between the geopolitical dominance of one global hegemonic power and another. Changezs overt presentation of American imperialism as an endlessly expansionist project, an extension of manifest destiny, thus actually belies a more complex analysis hinted at by the novel in which empires are inextricable from the territorial logics of capital accumulation and, partially as a result, historically unstable. Consider Giovanni Arrighis extraordinarily rich two-part essay, Hegemony Unraveling, which appeared in New Left Review in 2005, and later became core chapters in his nal book, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the 21st Century (2007). Arrighis essay treats the return to imperial rhetoric at the dawn of George W. Bushs twenty-rst century. For Arrighi, however, modern empire is an effect of capitalisms complex fusing together of the distinct, contradictory logics of capital and territory, the molecular processes of capital accumulation in space and time on the one hand, and the politics of state and empire on the other (David Harvey qtd. in Arrighi 27). In each era of

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capitalisms development, Arrighi argues, a hegemonic power (a state or empire) has used its political and military force to establish a world-spatial arrangement within which a certain regime of capital accumulation can proceed. Arrighi argues that, in fact, there have been four such phases: a Genoese, Dutch, British, and nally an American moment of global hegemony. Each time, however, the world created by that power reaches a structural limit to the capital accumulation it can accommodate. In these transitional moments, nance capital ascends to the foreground, traveling the globe to seek the outlines of a new spatial conguration. Like Jim in Hamids novel, Arrighi reads nance as if it were a rush of blood seeking a new historical outlet. For a time, the incumbent hegemon may wage a political and military rearguard action against the siphoning away of its economic dominance, but in the end that power has always lost out (sometimes cataclysmically) to emerging sites of capital accumulation that offer an even larger spatial x for capitalism than their predecessor (26). Arrighi interprets Bushs wars and the neo-conservative push to establish a second American century very much within this framework, as a military venture that has futilely sought to stave off, perhaps for another half a century or so, a notable decline in American global hegemony whose signal crisis was the loss of the Vietnam War, and for whom the post-9/11 situation represents its terminal crisis (34, 52, 57). The rubric of world-system literature offered in this essays title means to advance the idea that, while the rubrics of transnationalism or imperialism can be usefully brought to bear on literature, the ultimate horizon of understanding for both analytics would be the world-system, of which transnational relations and imperial power are but partial expressions. This recognition might initially seem to suggest that American literature should be critically approached as part of world literature. But here we would need to distinguish what we mean from the humanist model of world literature that Goethe originally proposed or even the cosmopolitan version that Marx and Engels conceived of when they spoke of capitalisms dissolution in the domain of literature of all national one-sidedness and narrowmindedness (477). Nor would world-system literature especially resemble the nominalistic model proposed by Wai Chee Dimock, in which we treat American literature as a subset of whatever larger literary grouping it suits the critic to name into existence.4 It comes closer to what Amitava Kumar suggestively termed world bank literature, a term by which he sought to return our attention to relations of wealth, power, and exploitation in the globalization of literary studies.5 Still, I prefer the category world-system literature

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because the singling out of the World Bank or any other identiable institutional culprit (the IMF, the WTO) can obscure the more difcult structural question: when and how does literature register the ( political, military, economic) deployments of power that organize or reorganize global spacesnations, cities, regions, peripheries, and centers alike? Such a category of literary analysisworld-system literature would therefore rigorously consider how literature from different locations in the global order registers unequal exchanges and politico-military applications of power. The analytic of world-system literature might include Franco Morettis investigations of the diffusion (from center to periphery) of generic forms like the novel. It might also include the study of global cultural capital and the geographies of literary value-accumulation, as Pascale Casanova has explored in The World Republic of Letters (2005). Neither approach, however, sufces insofar as they tend not to take seriously the more complex features of world-systems theory, namely its investigations into moments of contradiction between the logics of capital and territory, when dialectical pressures have forced transformations of global space and the rearrangement of its circuits of power and wealth. Such transformations are themselves productive of literature on a variety of levels: they effect the migration of writers, establish the comparative spaces that literary texts seek to represent, and, crucially, lead to retroactive renarrations of both local and world histories that can make sense of the new spatial arrangements. The implications of all this for a novel like The Reluctant Fundamentalist are important. Hamids novel engages Americas signal crisis rst through its thematization of contemporary nance, and then through its continual haunting by the historical rise and fall of empires. When Changez comes to see his position at Underwood Samson as akin to an Ottoman Empires janissarys, he identies proudly with the imperial splendor of Pakistans seventeenth-century Mughal Empire which conquered much of the South Asian subcontinent. In those times, Changez notes, we were: conquering kings. We built the Royal Mosque and the Shalimar Gardens in this city, and we build the Lahore Fort with its mighty walls and wide ramp for our battle-elephants. And we did these things when your country was still a collection of thirteen small colonies, gnawing away at the edge of a continent (102). If Changez here expresses pride in seventeenth-century Islamic South Asias superiority to the minor English colonies of the same century that would someday become the US, Changez also exemplies the downfall of Islamic imperial splendor. The very name Changez, as Hamid observed in an interview, is Urdu for Genghis Khan. Changez is thereby identied with the invader

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who attacks and destroys the Caliphate, the largest and most successful Muslim empire of its time (Hamid, Slaying Dragons 14). Other fallen empires also make appearances along the way, as, for example, when Changez notes that his educated Pakistani speech may have appealed to senior colleagues because like Pakistan, America is, after all, a former English colony, and it stands to reason, therefore, that an Anglicized accent may in your country continue to be associated with wealth and power, just as it is in mine (42). Traces of former imperial power continue to impress, even as they remind us that the territorial expanse they once represented is no more. It is along these same lines that Changez grows familiar with the city of Valparaiso, whose fortunes sank in inverse relation to the rising power of the US imperium: once a great port fought over by rivals because of its status as the last stop for vessels making their way from the Pacic to the Atlantic, [Valparaiso] had been bypassed and rendered peripheral by the Panama Canal. In thisValparaisos former aspirations to grandeurI was reminded of Lahore and of that saying, so evocative in our language: the ruins proclaim the building was beautiful (144). This emphasis on decline seems central to all of the novels imperial references. Empires may rise, places like Lahore, Valparaiso, and even Britain itself may emerge as hubs of world power and wealth, only to slide at last into a lovely ruin that offers only a dysfunctional nostalgia; Changez recalls this to have been the affective norm of his childhood in Pakistan: I did grow up with a poor boys sense of longing, in my case not for what my family had never had, but for what we had had and lost. Some of my relatives held on to imagined memories the way homeless people hold onto lottery tickets. Nostalgia was their crack cocaine, if you will, and my childhood was littered with the consequences of their addiction: unserviceable debts, squabbles over inheritances, the odd alcoholic or suicide (71). Strikingly however, the novels key gure for dysfunctional nostalgia, a character that does in fact appear to commit suicide, is not Pakistani but an American. A heavy-handed allegorical gure, (Am)Erica, Changezs girlfriend, personies the narrators romantic national investments, his ill-fated love affair with American life. One might therefore expect Changezs romantic attachment to unravel alongside his growing alienation from Underwood Sampson and the US, in the classic story form of rejecting the girl who embodies the protagonists original bad choices. But this is not what happens at all. Changezs relationship with Erica fails, as I noted earlier, as a result of the downward spiral she takes after

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the 9/11 attacks, a mental breakdown that leads rst to her institutionalization, and nally to her apparent suicide. On rst sight, Erica seems to represent American wealth and success in its fullness: a beautiful WASP graduate from Princeton moving in elite circles, vacationing in Greece, and enjoying all the benets of metropolitan existence. But Changez soon notices something amiss, what he calls the crack inside her that evokes in him an almost familial tenderness (59). Erica has never fully recovered from the loss of her childhood boyfriend, Chris, who unexpectedly died of lung cancer. Although she has managed to pull herself together sufciently to nish college, what Changez detects in her is a kind of fragility indicating that all her seemingly admirable success and appeal might collapse at the slightest pressure. The 9/11 attacks function as a quilting point between the novels romance and its geopolitical narrative. Why exactly, we might ask, do the World Trade Center attacks shatter Erica? Or to be more exact, if the attacks trigger the nal splintering of the crack that was already within her, how do they signify the reassertion of her original trauma of losing Chris? The novel offers little aid in interpreting the meaning of Ericas former boyfriend. We know only that Erica and Chris lived across the hall from one another from a very young age, that they were close childhood friends before becoming lovers, and nally this: at one point, Changez notices on the wall in Ericas room a curious drawing that depicts under stormy skies a tropical island with a runway and a steep volcano; nestled in the caldera of the volcano was a lake with another, smaller island in itan island on an islandwonderfully sheltered and calm (52). The picture, it turns out, was drawn by Chris himself, inspired (as Erica explains) by Flight 714, one of his favorite Tintin comics. Tintin comics were immensely popular early-to-mid-twentieth-century cartoons by the Belgian George Rem that are themselves famous for projecting the European colonial view of the world through their racially caricatured, swashbuckling travel advens tures. The particular book in question, Flight 714, one of Rem post-WWII books, was produced at a time when he believed that the future of the world depended on the success of a New Order represented by American ascendancy. While the fantasy world out of which Chris sketched his drawing is thus associated with the globalization of American power, it also ominously foreshadows the turn of current events: the eponymous ight 714 refers to an aircraft high-jacking orchestrated by an evil genius who seeks to thwart that New Order. Seen in the light of these connotations, Chriss sketch of a wonderfully sheltered interior island momentarily protected from the storms brewing outside might suggest the calm pleasures of nding a way to ignore the stormy challenges to US global

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hegemony. Flight 714 was published in 1968, during the ill-fated Vietnam War and at the dawn of what Arrighi would refer to as the signal crisis of the American hegemon, when the unsustainability of indenite US military and economic supremacy was rst revealed (52). Such signal crises, Arrighi suggests, are often fol poque, a period of apparent hegemonic restoralowed by a belle e tion that is nonetheless a time of transition, when the crack within the hegemons power can be discerned through its liquication into nance, and the ow of its capital toward emergent powers. The hanging image of Tintins island hints at Ericas melancholic nostalgia for her narcissistic over-identication with Chris, in which the two form a kind of omnipotently self-enclosed romantic oneness that was ultimately destroyed by Chriss illness and death. Changezs own attempts at winning intimacy with Erica is continually foiled by her lingering, nostalgic attachment to the lost wholeness of her relationship with Chris that Changez can only penetrate (as he does quite literally in the novels only scene of successful sex) by pretending to be Chris. Chris might also quite obviously refer to Christ or Christianity. If Changez can only ever win (Am)Erica by acting as Chris, then this scene hearkens back emphatically to Changezs status as a reverse janissary, a Muslim who has become a Christian soldier, ghting to destroy his own civilization. The title, reluctant fundamentalist, which the reader initially might assume refers to Changezs ultimate conversion to radical Muslim extremism, might well turn out instead to refer to his conversion to Christian fundamentalism, his embracing of the role of Chris to satisfy his desire for a sickly Erica heading toward ruin. It is the US of Underwood Samson, after all, whose motto for its employees is focus on the fundamentals (98). It therefore makes narrative sense on several levels that Erica is shattered by the 9/11 attacks. On a literal psychological register, it represents the successful return of Flight 714 from the Tintin comic, this time to strike a successful blow against an American hegemon. But on an allegorical level too, if Erica represents a poque America already cracked by everything represented belle-e in the death of her rst Christhe Vietnam War, the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, the dismantling of its Fordist industrial economy, and the vulnerability of an economy increasingly dependent on nance and debt managed by Wall Streetthen the strike against the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan represents the loss of her second Chris, Changez himself, when he unexpectedly experiences the falling towers to be pleasing symbols of the military and the nancial hollowings of American power, the arrival of what

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Arrighi calls its terminal crisis (57). At the end of the novel, as it increasingly appears that the American, the novels second-person addressee, is perhaps an assassin preparing to kill Changez, we are left with the possibility that this long confession has been Changezs masochistic preparation for his own death, the conversion of a political assassination into a mercy-killing suicide at the hands of an American who can bring a kind of closure to his unrequited love for Erica. The worlding that The Reluctant Fundamentalist offers us, therefore, is still inescapably a phantasmatic one, subtended even in its harshest and most realist moments by relations of geopolitical desire and loss. World-system literature is not simply literature that maps the scales and coordinates of the globe for us as might a chart of gross domestic products, oil consumption rates, or ballistic missiles. Rather, it is a literature that maps the dynamics of the system as an interplay of subject and objectpower and desire, force and affectas they are propelled by the spatial dialectics of territory and capital. These politicolibidinal forms of allegory are not at all distant from the theorization that Fredric Jameson offered decades ago in the context of third world literature, a theorization that Imre Szeman rightly argues has been willfully misunderstood.6 The allegorical character of third world literature was never asserted by Jameson as an aesthetic quality or a genre claim, but rather as an observation about the comparative ease with which one can discern the public character of private predicaments.7 Jamesons point could be applied equally to world-system literature, which differs from the category of the third world literature primarily in that the geopolitical relationships that it avails allegorically, by exceeding the forms of national narrative, express instead a broader network of relationships across the unequal exchanges that striate the globe. World-system literature about America in this conjuncture of the world-system is a literature of terminal crisis, with all its implications for a multiplicity of global locales. What it means, in Changezs words, to have felt that a world had ended is a question for this literature. What those feelings signify is a question for criticism. It may be that the negative relationship between a world and a world-system is where we should look for a utopian moment in world-system literature. Do the imaginings of a world-system in crisis open opportunities of imagining a qualitatively different world that is not a world-system, not the fresh round of accumulation that accompanies the next reconguration of global space, but a glimmer of something that could be new? That would certainly be a different sort of worldliness. In any event, perhaps the emergence of a world-systems literature about US power that is not itself American literature can be read as the textually complex symptom of a world-system in transition,

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[P]erhaps the emergence of a world-systems literature about US power that is not itself American literature can be read as the textually complex symptom of a world-system in transition, a global hegemons empire writing back at the very moment of its destabilization.

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a global hegemons empire writing back at the very moment of its destabilization.

Notes
1. Like Hamids novel, Adigas The White Tiger (2008) is written in a direct address that straddles the world (more on how Hamids novel does this shortly). In the case of Adigas novel, the narrator is a Bangalorean entrepeneur writing to the Chinese premier Wen Jiabao about what his personal success story might reveal about the future of the world [that] lies with the yellow man and the brown man now that our erstwhile master, the white-skinned man, has wasted himself through buggery, cell phone usage, and drug abuse (34). Rushdies Shalimar The Clown (2005) deals with the murder of an architect of postwar American global dominance, the former US ambassador to India, Max Ophuls, as he is killed by a Kashmiri man whom he cuckolded many years earlier. Rushdies novel is premised on Ophulss historical vertigo, a man utterly bafed by a post-Cold War world no longer organized around that American dominance, and which faces the concomitant rise of Islamic radicalism. In short, all three novels are not American as American literary studies normally understands it, yet are profoundly concerned with Americas changing global status. How to read such narratives is the topic of this essay. 2. See Walkowitz, especially pages 53236.

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3. The groundbreaking text for this body of work is Amy Kaplan and Donald Peases seminal 1993 collection, Cultures of United States Imperialism. Other studies in this important tradition include John Eperjesis The Imperialist Imaginary: Visions of Asia and the Pacic in American Culture (2005); David Kazanjians The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America (2003); and Gretchen Murphys Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of U.S. Empire (2005). 4. See Wai Chee Dimock, Planet and America: Set and Subset, Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature (2007), ed. Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell, 116, esp. 4. 5. See Amitava Kumar, ed., World Bank Literature (2003).

6. See Fredric Jameson, Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism, Social Text (15) 1986: 6588. 7. For Szeman, the difcult question that Jamesons essay raises is precisely why the allegory would be national as opposed to political in a more general sense (81314). Szeman concludes that what motivates Jameson here is a recognition that the nation-form permits the imagining of politicized collectivities for which few alternatives exist. This valuable point raises an interesting question as to whether or not world-system literature, which is fundamentally relational in its politics, has a means of invoking any sense of collectivity through its allegorical function. To my mind, this question remains undecided, and a subject that deserves further investigation.

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Works Cited
Adiga, Aravind. The White Tiger. New York: Free Press, 2008. Arrighi, Giovanni. Hegemony Unravelling1. New Left Review 32 (March/April 2005): 23 80. Hamid, Mohsin. The Reluctant Fundamentalist. New York: Harvest, 2007. . Slaying Dragons. Psychoanalysis and History 11.2 (2009): 225 37. cs, Georg. Narrate or Describe. Luka Writer and Critic and Other Essays. Trans. and ed. Arthur Kahn. London: Merlin, 1978. 110 48. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The Manifesto of the Communist Party. The Marx-Engels Reader. 2nd ed. Ed. Robert C. Tucker. New York: Norton, 1978. 469500. Robbins, Bruce. The Worlding of the American Novel. The Cambridge History of the American Novel. Ed. Leonard Cassuto. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. 1096106. Szeman, Imre. Whos Afraid of National Allegory? Jameson, Literary Criticism, Globalization. South Atlantic Quarterly 100.3 (Summer 2001): 80327. Walkowitz, Rebecca. The Location of Literature: The Transnational Book and the Migrant Writer. Contemporary Literature 47.4 (Winter 2006): 52745.

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