Untranslatables: A World System

brooks obvious dangers. Postnationalism can lead to blindness toward economic and national power struggles that literary politics often front for, while potentially minimizing conflict among interests of monocultural states and multilingual communities (as in current U.S. policy that uses an agenda of cultural homogeneity to patrol immigrant languages and to curtail bilingual education). National neutrality can also lead, problematically, to promotion of generic critical lexicons that presume universal translatability or global applicability. Theoretical para digms, many centered in Western literary practices and conventions, thus forget that they are interculturally incommensurate. Moreover, though planetary inclusion may be goal of new lexicons in contemporary comparative literature, they often paradoxically reinforce dependency on a national/ethnic nominalism that gives rise to new exclusions. Ideally, one would redesign literary studies to respond critically and in real time to cartographies of emergent world-systems. Parag Khanna, writing from an American think tank perspective on shrinkage of U.S. as a superpower, usefully identifies a host of new Second World, midsize empires built up from global trade-offs in resources and financial services whose networks traverse but also bypass The Big Three (China, Europe, America). Khanna's nomenclature, from retro regionalisms (the Middle Kingdom, Greater Chinese Co-Prosperity Sphere) to modern transnational acronyms like the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, associated through their common status as sites of the world's greatest concentration of foreign-exchange re serves and savings) assigns renewed momentum to thinking in empires (problematic in my view), but it is at least responsive to geopolitical configurations that overturn Western assumptions about who should be aligned with whom: New Literary History, 2008, 39: 581-598