87-99

Literary history in transnational perspective

• Auerbach, Jonathan

Looking at a pair of Jack London stories set in the South Seas (from Polynesia to Melanesia), this essay traces the material fate of objects that take on special significance during disorienting transactions between Westerners and native islanders encountering one another across nebulous zones of contact on land and at sea. For Westerners these commodities (including slaves) circulate in an abstract global system of exchange, homogenized in value either by money or trade items such as tobacco. But for the Pacific natives these objects come to signify a kind of irreducible subjectivity ultimately tied to a corporeal integrity that struggles to resist the depersonalizing tendencies of worldwide capitalism. While London understands that the postcolonial condition makes it impossible to return to indigenous forms of value and identity, his ironic depictions of these entanglements between peoples and things (suggesting at once the power and limits of Western incursion] testify to his rather shrewd understanding of early twentieth-century globalization and its discontents.

• Languages and Literature
• Social and economic geography

• Λογοτεχνία
• Ανθρωπολογία

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