New Left Review 72, November-December 2011

pascale casanova

COMBATIVE LITERATURES

Nations’, wrote Marcel Mauss, ‘are recent things, far from having completed their evolution.’ [1] They remain a tricky subject. Discussion often tends either to solipsism, dealing with single nations as self-contained case studies, or to denial: globalization, it is claimed, has mercifully transcended such obsolete categories. Rather than choosing between national settings or a global landscape, this essay will attempt to look at literary developments on a national scale, but from a global vantage-point or ‘promontory’, to borrow Braudel’s metaphor. [2] And rather than taking nations and nationalisms as unproblematic facts, it will approach them as ‘cultural artefacts’, in Benedict Anderson’s term, constituted by belief in a collectivity as a primary form of identification. Mauss spoke of this as ‘national credit’, emphasizing that it is a circular system: ‘Collectively, the citizens of a state form a unity in which belief is held in the national credit; other countries have confidence in this credit, to the extent that they believe in that unity.’ [3]

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