Just Add Global

What happens when a field is no longer the site of a shared political mission? This essay considers the simultaneous "global" turns in modernist studies and postcolonial studies, arguing that in each case a field defined by a set of central theoretical commitments and purposes was replaced by an understanding of a field as a hospitable location in which multiple competing projects might coexist. The essay suggests, using a reading of Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Petals of Blood in the context of Russian literature, that our new field formations invite an understanding of solidarity as a fragile, contingent possibility: something that we can't merely detect in the present, but must look for in new and sometimes unforeseen forms.