UNESCO AND THE WORLD-LITERARY SYSTEM IN CRISIS

This article discusses the implications for the literary field of the restructuring of global capitalist production since the early 1970s, using UNESCO’s literature-based programming as its case. Its particular focus is the real complementarity of what would appear to be divergent phenomena: expanding investment in the idea of the creative economy (proclaiming the social and economic protagonism of art and literature); and the exacerbation of structural asymmetries that delimit participation in this economy to an elite strata. It thus highlights the constitutive unevenness of relations in the literary milieu, produced by and enmeshed with histories of colonial occupation, and of subjugations via race, language, gender, and other forces.