Perera notably doesn’t follow Hardt and Negri (Harvard, 2000) into a disavowal of nations – she just points out that our experiences are not wholly constrained by them. Equally, she pushes back on elitist visions of ‘world’ literature, including Pascale Cassanova’s Eurocentric, prize-centric World Republic of Letters (Harvard, 2005).
2.
My class pushes these boundaries, too. Despite the name ‘American Working Class Literature’, I teach about the outside of America, the impact of tourism and Free Trade Zones (Jamaica Kincaid and Life and Debt), and about migration to the US (Kao Kalia Yang, Jimmy Santiago Baca), both its causes and its results. Perera might say that I could do more; I can only protest that I’m making history not just as I please, but with the institutional conditions I’ve inherited.
3.
For example: ‘daily, improvisatory practices and dialogic exchanges’; ‘responsibility-based ethics, ethico-political negotiations of the everyday’ (pp. 4, 113).
4.
OsnosPeter, ‘A new era for books: the Random House-Penguin merger is just the start’, The Atlantic, 8November2012.
5.
LoveDylan, ‘A publishing company is enforcing a copyright on the works of Marx and Engels and people are freaking out’, Business Insider, 29April2014.
6.
DíazJunot, ‘MFA vs. POC’, The New Yorker, 30April2014.
