Inter-imperiality: Vying Empires, Gendered Labor, and the Literary Arts of Alliance by Laura Doyle

© 2024 Johns Hopkins University Press

Among the most important books in literary studies in the last decade, Laura Doyle’s Inter-imperiality: Vying Empires, Gendered Labor, and the Literary Arts of Alliance deserves sustained attention. Situated between comparative literary studies, world history, decolonial theory, and gender studies, Inter-imperiality recasts literary history as a counterpoint to the world history of empires. Profoundly interdisciplinary, it makes a forceful case for the relevance of literary analysis to the comparative study of empires—and coloniality.  

Inter-imperiality offers a theory of relation, intersecting and supplementing accounts of relationality from Édouard Glissant to Shu-mei Shih. In this framework, subjectivity is inherently relational; we are always already in the world with others. Communities are likewise radically relational; whether states, empires, or villages, they form in relation to other communities. Doyle’s book zooms in on the relational nature of empires in the longue durée. The inter in inter-imperiality names the co-formation and ongoing competition between empires, synchronically (empires compete) and diachronically (empires displace other empires or cull know-how from older empires). This account never suggests that empires are the only agents in world history; it does suggest, however, that before and after what Janet L. Abu-Lughod has called “European hegemony,” power, inequality, and creative alliances have been distributed within an inter-imperial field.

The chapters of the book focus on a constellation of “shatterzones” with complex inter-imperial histories: the Middle East, Indonesia, eastern Europe, the Andes, the Caribbean, and the Maghreb. The legacy of multiple empires in these regions translates into multiple languages and literary traditions, multiple religious and spiritual traditions, multiple ethnic and racial fields. “Such regions need to be understood and honored,” writes Doyle, “not as peripheral territories but as strategic inter-imperial zones, again and again vied over for their resources (including laborers) and their geopolitical location—before, during, and since the height of European hegemony” (15). Individual and collective agents maneuver within this interimperial field, a function of often contradictory interpositioning, which includes “vying identifications” and “defensive attachments” (16). Such manuevering sees anti-colonial struggles sometimes enlisting the help of other empires or drawing from discourses of empire. At stake is a more nuanced understanding of “what this surround of multiple empires means from the perspective of the colonized” (37).

The legacy of competing empires includes material infrastructure but also language—literary language. We know that empires often use language and translation as instruments of control, but this book’s signature dialectical move also reveals literature as a force. Inter-imperiality becomes “both a condition of aesthetic production and an object of literary representations” (25). Between these poles, literary analysis frames various modes in which “macropolitics play out in bodily microphysics” (26). Such analysis retraces the profile of literary characters or the affective dimensions of collective struggle, revealing how “literatures become reservoirs of a sedimented political consciousness” (25). A focus on the reader can “dramatize their audiences’ compromising entanglements” (26). An embedded pluralism anchors this project’s theory of relation: there is no empire, only empires; authors often “‘write back’ to multiple invaders and empires” (27). Since there is always more than one language at play in the inter-imperial field, literature is inherently multilingual.

Inter-imperiality is a welcome intervention in ongoing debates about world literature. The heart of the book consists of a multilevel reading of The Thousand and One Nights, “both exquisite example and historical catalyst of inter-imperial maneuvering through aesthetic forms” (69). First, this consequential choice places the urtext of world literature in the Arabic/Persian world, provincializing the Eurocentric canon. Second, this text comes before “European hegemony” but, through its translations, exists in relation to it. Third, the Orientalism that later attaches to The Thousand and One Nights, through translation, is produced in the context of Eurasian empires, decentering European Orientalism. Fourth, the circulation of literature is a function of translation, itself a version of translatio imperii. Fifth, this world literature starts with storytelling; the novel develops, late, building on this tradition. Sixth, it centers women’s storytelling as a strategy of survival and creativity.

Doyle’s book models an inter-imperial method. It moves between macropolitics (addressed through world history) and the microphysics of survival and intimacy (found in the literary archive). This elegant, careful dialectical method assuages potential worries about historical scale. The method radically reshuffles periodization, leaving the premodern/modern divide behind. Instead, modernity emerges as European empires enter the inter-imperial field through a claim to the modern and its attendant periodizations. The book teaches an elaborate vocabulary of inter-imperiality, such that we speak of entangled co-formation, the legacy of vying empires accruing over time, and multivectored contestations. Doyle’s project is a much-needed lesson in true interdisciplinarity. Although Hegel, placed in conversation with Chinese thought, remains central, the project’s theoretical apparatus is creolized. Finally, students of world literature will find here a model for a much-needed ethics of active and generous citation.

Inter-imperiality centers women’s labor in the history of empires. The theory of relation that underwrites the concept of inter-imperiality is anchored in embodiment, specifically birth as a mode of intercorporeality. Before the Hegelian master/bondsman, we have mother/child in the experience of pregnancy and birth. We are always already in relation on account of this beginning. And yet this beginning and, with it, relation is cyclically disavowed. Such disavowal often takes the form of violence against women in the name of state and household management, including rape. At the same time, the passion propelling this violence reveals itself as a symptom of the threat that women pose, including through their creative output, especially storytelling, which often works to frame and celebrate relationality.

The book is structured in three parts, each consisting of two or three chapters. Part I, “Co-Constituted Worlds,” builds on the Introduction to draw out the theory of dialectics underlying the concept of inter-imperiality and to provide a foundational literary analysis for the project. Produced at the crossroads of Persianate and Islamicate empires, the frame of The Thousand and One Nights analogizes the dynamic of vying empires at the heart of the inter-imperial field: “Insofar as the emperor’s wife killing triggers Shahrazad’s intervention, creating the text of The Nights, his reaction yields further disruption: it not only prompts her political action, but it also generates female and implicitly subaltern solidarity and a set of tales that, over centuries, have often (though not always) served to expose coercive relations” (80). Doyle zooms in on the figure of the vizier, Shahrazad’s father, as mediator of cultural and educational institutions and a theorist of the “instrumentalization of translation for control of women and laborers” (83). By hacking her father’s knowledge and resources, Shahrazad comes to stand for the process of “seizing the power of language from within the interstices of empires” (89).

Part II, “Convergence and Revolt,” an intervention in the debate on the relation between world literature and Orientalism, demonstrates that revolts against empires (including peasant revolts and anti-colonial revolts) occurred in an inter-imperial field and had a global dimension; the gothic novel becomes a depository of decolonial imaginaries. Doyle places Orientalism in its Eurasian matrix (involving Mughal, Safavid, Ottoman, and Russian imperial formations). The takeaways: the Orient is not strictly a European invention, but also a product of strategic, inter-imperial self-Orientalizing; West European Orientalism as theorized by Edward Said is a late historical phase in this history; the translation of The Thousand and One Nights into French, followed by other translations, played a crucial role in this European Orientalism; Russia (and, I would add, Eastern Europe) was an early target of the Western European Orientalist discourse of freedom and barbarism; over time, Orientalism was coopted for multiple and contradictory ends, such that many populations became Orientalized, including on the margins of the Ottoman empire.

Part III takes the project into the mid and late twentieth century and into a paradigmatic inter-imperial cultural geography, the Caribbean. The creolizations that define the region carry a “persisting temporality” of inter-imperiality. The last chapter of the book asks a consequential question: How to act when faced with “choices” defined by the inter-imperial field? In both chapters in this third part, inter-imperial histories return. And yet, in the series of often violent repetitions, Doyle discerns “delicate shifts” (247). They are situated at the intimate scale, the microphysics of the lovable and unlovable, and yet they have the potential to curb, through repetition, the enduring dynamics of inter-imperiality.

If Doyle’s book raises questions, it is because of the scale of its ambition. This reader would ask for more guidance on how to frame the avant-gardes and modernism once modernity is no longer conceptualized as a period; on the book’s aim to more fully account for the workings of the traffic in women as a structural feature of macropolitical economy; on the infrastructure of relation between various inter-imperial “shatterzones” at the global scale; on the ethics, practice and urgency of reading in translation—literature and theory alike.

“Literature’s political meanings are often shrouded in a dance of veils,” Doyle writes (115). The inter-imperial method does not translate into easily identifiable politics. The cultural field becomes ever more complex, history extends, actors and languages multiply, agencies are often steeped in complicity, solidarities are conflicted and overdetermined. But our politics often reach an impasse when we refuse to do the hard work of sifting through such complexities. This book does not let European empires off the hook; it asks us to understand them better, alongside non-European empires, across deep time, as a function of a broader inter-imperial condition in which they operated and in the shadow of which we continue to live. In doing so, it issues an ethical call to acknowledge and dwell in relation, or, at least, to “undo the denial of our radically relational condition” (32).