Department of English

• Thursday, February 27, 2020 - 5:00pm to 6:30pm

Fisher-Bennett Hall, Faculty Lounge Room 135 

José María Arguedas' Todas las sangres (All Bloods) (1964) and Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay's The Tale of Hansuli Turn (1951), I argue, are novels that offer unique and connected perspectives on their own historical conjunctures and theorize the articulation of race and dispossession in Peruvian and Bengali agrarian settings in the twentieth century capitalist world-system. Bringing these two literary texts into conversation with one another allows me to illuminate a shared condition I am calling agrarian globality. Agrarian globality is another name for the kind of connected history of dispossession, race, and the capitalist world-system that I construct across what are often seen as seemingly isolated geographies (the Andean highlands in Latin America and rural Bengal in the Indian subcontinent), non-capitalist institutions of landownership and rural labor (sharecropping, debt peonage, or bonded labor on the hacienda and zamindari), or enclosed community relations (casta and caste). I thus attempt to forge a materialist literary method for reading novels and develop a critical perspective for viewing the dynamic forces that join what are otherwise understood as disconnected rural geographies, economies, and social relations to a collectively inhabited world at large.

Please email David Buchanan (dbuchan@sas.upenn.edu) or Nick Millman (nmillman@sas.upenn.edu) to request a copy of the work-in-progress.