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What is materialism’s material? Thoughts toward (actually against) a materialism for “world literature”

Materialists in postcolonial literary studies can often tend to look past the literary material before them to the “material conditions” that seem the more urgent object of attention. This article argues that the materialist’s gaze should be fixed on the literary surface, not as a kind of code for an external material world, but as itself the material profile of the lived experience of need. To this end, the article introduces the concept of “the material” as it appears in the aesthetics of Theodor Adorno. It then considers the literary critical essays of Kamau Brathwaite as exemplary of a decolonizing materialist criticism. The argument is framed by the consideration of the re-emergence of “world literature” as a disciplinary framework.