World Theory as Reading Method

The usefulness as well as the ambition of Eli Jelly-Schapiro's Moments of Capital: World Theory, World Literature becomes fully apparent in its closing pages through the positing of two hypotheticals. The first wonders what it would mean for literary critics to be able to confidently incorporate a mainstream American novel like Jonathan Franzen's Freedom into the same interpretive system as the Congolese novelist Fiston Mwanza Mujila's Tram 83. The second cites Stuart Hall's call for a postcolonial studies that can see Nigeria and the United States both as part of the postcolonial world, albeit in radically different ways, rather than the former being the exception to the latter's normative rule: “They [the United States and Nigeria] belong, commonly, to the capitalist modernity shaped by the history of Empire and its afterlives” (214). The juxtaposition of these two seemingly unlikely analytical pairings encapsulates a key part of the book's central...