Marx and Marxism have always had a fraught relationship with geographies beyond Western Europe. In Orientalism, Edward Said famously argues that Marx’s writings on India express sympathy for the suffering of the colonized but ultimately reproduce Romantic Orientalist tropes through concepts like the “Asiatic Mode of Production” and “Oriental Despotism.” Cedric Robinson critiques Marx for severing the analysis of slavery from that of capitalism and argues that Marxism’s emphasis on the industrial working class sidelines other (racialized) actors in revolutionary struggles and proves ill-equipped to interrogate anti-imperialist movements in the 20th century. Yet some critics have sought to counter this more conventional Eurocentric image of Marx by conducting a true philological (re)reading of Marx’s most canonical works, by delving into his underexplored/unpublished writings, and by looking at subsequent theorists and political militants’ development of the Marxist tradition according to the conditions of their times. Harry Harootunian’s scholarship, for example, urges us to deprovincialize Marx and resituate his thought in lived historical specificities of non-western societies. This seminar invites papers that build on these debates and tackle a core tension not only within Marxism but also particularly pronounced in the encounter between Marxism and postcolonialism, that is, the tension between the necessity of grasping capitalism as a totality and the need to acknowledge the irreducible differences among regions (e.g., the theory of combined and uneven development). If the studies of comparative and world literature are still undergirded mainly by the vocabularies and logics of capitalism, then what would happen to these disciplines when we begin to read Marxist theory as a global phenomenon? Likewise, what critical pressure do Marx and Marxism exert on the burgeoning frameworks of postcolonial and Global South comparatism as well as comparative subalternities? How can a series of critical, situated, and close readings of Marx perform the task of training imagination and rearranging desires to contain the march of capitalism, to make Marxism truly global (Spivak 2017)? 

Topics may include:

The translations, circulations, and receptions of Marx’s thought in non-western societies;

The indigenization, reimagination, and reappropriation of Marx’s universal categories; 

Transnational exchanges between global leftist traditions; 

Characteristics of capital accumulation and labor movements in non-western societies;

Marxism and subalternity;

Marxism and Third World feminism;

Racial capitalism;

Ecological Marxist perspectives on non-western environments;

The studies of world literature in the Marxist vein;

The intersection between Marxism, postcolonialism, and Global South studies; 

Marxist aesthetics in non-western societies;

Marxism and theories and methods of comparison