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Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India, and the Afrasian Imagination, by Gaurav Desai

and aesthetics of ‘interruption’ (p. 25) in the first instance, and the reversal of the ‘urbanist telos’ (p. 26) of the post-colonial literature of labour. Perera proposes (and fitfully delivers) not just a political, but a rhetorical, analysis of the literariness of working-class literature in Chapter 3: gender, genre, and the politics of history are the organising principles here. The North American Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio: From the Thirties, a classic text that ushers in the decade of international socialism that was the 1930s, is mined for the ways in which its speech interference prevents labour literature from ossifying into an emblematic object. Perera’s thematising of ‘the lost parts in the telling of the story’ (p. 84) is what purportedly connects the Olsen text to the stories and poems of post-independence Sri Lanka, as seen in Dabindu, the corpus of writing by free-trade-zone women workers, though the relationship between the structural interruptions of the single-authored Olsen text and the somewhat choiceless collaboration of the unfinished (and processual) Dabindu text is not rigorously examined or satisfactorily explained. The section on Mahasweta Devi’s ‘Marxist-feminist critique of historicism’ (p. 101), while valuable for its analysis of Spivak’s singular interpretations of Devi and Marx, seems only notionally connected to the interruptive narrative logic of the Olsen and Dabindu works. Chapter 4, also focused on a woman author, posits ‘nonbelonging as the condition of internationalism’ (p. 163). Perera successfully revisits the symptomatic splitting of Bessie Head’s apartheid-era novel, A Question of Power, to read its tropes of alienated belonging and its vision of connective and collective agrarian movements as mutually constitutive. The structuring of chapters is sometimes muddled, especially when plot summaries follow critical exegesis, or when the context is broached after the textual reading has been performed. The argument has facets but fails to gather momentum or critical mass. The choice of primary works could have been more daring and original, the comparative frame better justified, and Perera lets Marx, Williams, and Spivak do most of the talking. That said, this monograph on the intransigence of ground-level working-class writing, which appears at a time when English Studies is increasingly seduced by the aerial view offered by the world literary, is a welcome addition and a worthwhile read.