For Brazilian critic Antonio Candido, literature has the potential to grasp the peculiar “social dynamic” of a time and place (85). In other words, literary form has the ability to articulate social form. Despite claims that globalisation would be the ‘tide that lifts all ships’, particular forms of gender and racial inequality persist, along with ecologically destructive resource extraction. In fact for feminist critics such as Himani Bannerji, and Gonzalez and Neton, global capitalism reproduces regional divisions of labour such as women’s domestic work—thereby conjoining spheres of unpaid work to the global market—work made harder and more precarious, argues Wilma Dunaway, amid the droughts and food shortages of the climate emergency (16). This seminar invites papers analysing literary articulations of these combined and uneven social forms. Taking our lead from WReC for whom world-literature is literature registering in its form and content the upheavals of the capitalist world-system, this seminar seeks to bring together research on situated, regionally specific examples of the articulation or ‘subsumption’ of pre-existing social forms by capital, and the cultural impact of this process. We wonder, for example, if socially reproductive labour—foisted largely upon women—constitutes that which “cannot be subsumed or is not worth subsuming” (Gonzalez and Neton 169), thereby providing opportunities to link together texts about domestic work or motherhood in core capitalist regions with, say, cultural production in colonial Bengal where, for Bannerji, “family life was to become part of the Bengali middle-class society which lay outside the influence of all changes brought in by the new mode of production. It is not surprising, therefore, that […] the expectations regarding women’s responsibility in maintaining emotional and physical comforts increased astronomically” (583). We invite papers on topics including:

• Which literary forms have most effectively conveyed hybrid modes of production—ones resting on a combination of waged and unwaged labour?


• How the novel form articulates socially reproductive labour—that “abject” work that, for Gonzalez and Neton, “no one else is willing to do” (171).


• What aesthetic strategies have been used to represent the entanglement of ‘women’s work’, ecology, and globalisation?


• Literary responses to capitalism’s subsumption of social forms ‘outside’ of it—or, how has fiction grasped the penetration of the commodity form and abstract labour, alongside the reproduction of unpaid forms of labour?


• Literary homologies across disparate sites of surplus labour—are there similarities in the registration of unpaid domestic labour in the Bengali novel, and coerced Black labour in apartheid-era writing?


• Value-theoretical analyses of hybrid or “Zwitterform” social forms (Shapiro 60); and what is the relationship between value form and literary form in this context?