Economic Informality and World Literature

This book analyses the impact of economic informality on the novel form across the modern world-system, looking specifically at works by Antonio de Almeida, Machado de Assis, Dany Laferrière, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Nadine Gordimer, and Masande Ntshanga. It sees the representation of informal economies as a structural homology of world-literature. In chapters on the figure of the agregado in the nineteenth-century Brazilian novel; sex work in Haitian fiction; the politics of the informal economy in the post-apartheid South African novel; and Ngugi’s representation African occult economies, Josh Jewell explores the relationship between the rise of improvised economic activity—and its consolidation under neoliberalism in postcolonial nations—and literary form. He shows how informal economies can be grasped as locations of strategy and improvisation whose subjects must shift constantly between officialdom and underground networks; between the realms of the licit and illicit. This produces highly heterogenous narratives oscillating between different tones and registers (unserious and tragic), social spaces (working-class and elite), and conceptions of reality. By comparing the various situated aesthetics of informality, this book instrumentalises the Warwick Research Collective’s compelling but nebulous idea of a world-literature that “variously registers” a “singular modernity”.