Notes Toward a Dialectical Method: Modernities, Modernisms, and the Crossings of Empire

Abstract

The last few decades of postcolonial, national, and transnational studies make it possible to do fuller justice to the layered histories that have shaped literature's circulation. Recent historical work on the medieval period through the 18th century establishes that both inter-imperial jockeying and anti-colonial resistance have shaped literature as it travels. Historians' accounts of these interconnected histories enable us to construct a transnational ‘histoire croisée’ with a highly dialectical accent. Building on this scholarship, this essay first of all foregrounds the interactive co-production of modern empires, including Ottoman and European empires. It then surveys some of the complex histories of cultural transmission by which Ottoman, Asian, and African cultures have formed ‘the West’ at its cultural foundations, whether through modeling ‘public sphere’ spaces, such as coffeehouses or western philosophers' study of Asian ideals of ‘organic’ esthetic form and political ethics. The essay then closes with a brief consideration of global modernisms in the light of this long history, highlighting new scholarship that moves toward the dialectical methodology conceptualized here.