Let there be no mistake about it; it is to this zone of occult instability where the people dwell that we must come; and it is there that our souls are crystallized and that our perceptions and our lives are transfused with light.

—Frantz Fanon, “On National Culture”Footnote 1

A bewildering and contradictory set of data, experiences, and critical positions attend the contemporary debate about labour. Despite the orthodox claim that capitalism “eliminat[es] peasantries” and “push[es people] out of agriculture” and into industry as proletarians (Endnotes n.p.), ‘long downturn’ theorists note “a chronic under-demand for labour” (Benanav 117). Yet formal employment in the deindustrialised United States is reported to be relatively high (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2), leading those such as Aaron Benanav to suggest that the problem is not “mass unemployment” but “continuously rising under-employment” (118). As a literary critic my own readings across world-literature tell a particular story about the experience of work, one concerned not so much with proletarianisation and unemployment, but more with constant shifts between the drastically different kinds of work people have to do in order to secure minimal social reproduction.

The result of what is often called the moving contradiction of capital is that more and more workers are drawn into a system of production that increasingly renders them redundant through greater ‘efficiencies’ of the process. This creates a vast ‘reserve army of labour’ which, when left unaided by income from wage or welfare, often has to struggle for the means to reproduce itself through ad hoc work, communal pooling of resources, or eliciting the favour of patrons. Amid this to-ing and fro-ing, the work that Maya Gonzalez and Jeanne Neton call “abject reproduction”—namely the work “no one else is willing to do”—will “in the end mainly be foisted upon women” or, we might add, groups whose labour is systematically devalued (171). But compare this—or Melinda Cooper’s work on the deferral of reproductive labour to the family amid the neoliberal attack on the welfare state—with Harold Wolpe’s research on the political economy of apartheid:

When the migrant worker has access to means of subsistence, outside the capitalist sector, as he [sic] does in South Africa, then the relationship between wages and the cost of the production and reproduction of labour power is changed. That is to say capital is able to pay the worker below the cost of his reproduction. (434)

Or John Lonsdale and Bruce Berman’s work on Kenya:

Elders who had organized the local circuits of reciprocity could convert them into funds of accumulation; services once rewarded with the means of production – women, livestock or land – might now be paid off with the means of subsistence only, food or cash, and thus become a source of surplus value. The potential for distortions of property rights, marital rights, parental or filial obligations, were endless, as indigenous modes of production yielded up produce or labour to merchant or landed capital. (78–9)

A consistent feature of labour across the world-system, then, is the informal and improvisatory nature of people’s working patterns necessitated by the articulation of modes of production. This is the crucial import of Schwarz’s work on Brazilian fiction which features prominently the figure of the agregado: “neither proprietor nor proletarian” who must shift restlessly between the opposed realms of a society that was simultaneously slaveowning and bourgeois in search of work or patronage (“Misplaced Ideas” 22). As diverse groups with different gender divisions of labour, racialised histories of labour, and so on are unevenly integrated into the capitalist world-system, literature has registered this erratic form of work at the level of both content and form.

Taking my lead from the Brazilian critic Roberto Schwarz, for whom cultural forms are shaped by objective conditions, in this book I analyse the impact of economic informality on the novel across the world-system. I am interested here in fiction which registers the experience of having to move between what Gonzalez and Neton call the “indirectly market-mediated sphere” and the directly market mediated sphere, or wage labour (153), which has led me to investigations into the literature of Brazil—which, for much of the nineteenth century, maintained an articulated slaveowning and bourgeois economy; the Caribbean—a region with a large population of informal workers long excluded from the high concentrations of capital in the hands of settlers and their descendants; South Africa—which, under apartheid, maintained ‘Bantustans’ where labour was reproduced at no cost to capital or the state; Kenya—a settler colony which saw a variation of the South African model, not however legally codified as was apartheid; and the United Kingdom and the United States—where the dismantling of the welfare state has seen the cost of the reproduction of labour itself shifted back onto families and communities. By analysing Memoirs of a Militia Sergeant (1854), Dom Casmurro (1899), Heading South (2006), The Pickup (2001), The Reactive (2014), Wizard of the Crow (2006), and Temporary (2020), I argue that narratives of precarious workers in casual or informal employment in different parts of the world-system are shaped by uneven and combined development. While the concept of the ‘informal economy’—Keith Hart’s term for the non-wage labour sector in Ghana—has been used primarily by scholars of African society and culture, I argue that by looking at work on economies of favour, unofficial or extra-legal forms of governance or resource distribution, and non-wage sectors, from various locations across the world-system, we will see that social and economic informality is a common thread of global capitalist modernity.Footnote 2 Looking at criticism and fiction from Brazil, Haiti, South Africa, Kenya, and the United Kingdom I explore the aesthetic features that arise from and grapple with this crucial yet undertheorised experience of global capitalist modernity.

Research on economic informality has largely taken place within African studies, with many scholars citing Keith Hart’s 1973 essay on the non-wage labour sector in Ghana as the earliest sociological work on the ‘informal economy’. Ato Quayson, Sarah Nuttall, and Achille Mbembe have produced the most influential studies on topics such as the aesthetics of superfluity (Mbembe 37), the cultural economy of free time (Quayson 199), and the idea of the African metropolis or ‘Afropolis’ (Nuttall and Mbembe 1–36), where these flexible, improvisatory, and informal itineraries and cultural forms manifest. Despite acknowledging that many of these urban and cultural phenomena are shaped by “[t]he vast expansion in urban populations along with the dramatic dislocations in urban life since the oil crises of the 1970s”, work on economic informality has rarely looked beyond Africa to other locations that are vulnerable to the shocks of globalisation (Quayson 201). Indeed work on the regional impacts of global modernisation has often sought to single out Africa as an exceptional case—hence Nuttall and Mbembe’s idea of the Afropolis. But if we put into dialogue research on different regions’ extra-legal resource distribution networks, non-wage sectors, and economies of favour, we begin to see that economic informality is one of the unifying themes of global capitalist modernity. For Chabal and Daloz, for example, “[t]he state in sub-Saharan Africa has not been institutionalized – in that it has not become structurally differentiated from society – so that its formal structure ill-manages to conceal the patrimonial and particularistic nature of power” (1–2). Jobs, business contracts, and resources are distributed through networks based on kinship and prestige rather than simply citizenship or merit. In postcolonial Africa, then, the liberal capitalist institutions of the state or parliamentary democracy are mediated by social ethics which contradict their ideal-typical function. Now consider Roberto Schwarz’s argument that, due to the coexistence of slavery and liberal capitalism in nineteenth-century Brazil, the “access to social life” of “the free man” who was neither slave, nor “proprietor, nor proletarian”, “depended, in one way or another, on the favour of a man of wealth and power” (22). “Favour” for Schwarz, “was present everywhere, combining itself […] to administration, politics, industry, commerce, the life of the city, the court, and so on” (22). This ostensibly paradoxical economy of favour, born of the contradictory pressures of slavery and liberalism, produces—for Schwarz—the novels of Machado de Assis in which beleaguered freemen like José Dias struggle for agency whilst still trying to flatter capricious patrons like Bento Santiago or Brás Cubas. The arbitrariness of the liberal values held by the latifundia in such an environment is dramatised, for Schwarz, in Machado de Assis’s Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas [The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas] (1881) in which the eponymous narrator lays bare the caprice of a slaveowning elite that nevertheless draped itself in the mantle of a European high culture which included the anti-slavery of Voltaire and Diderot. The almost hilarious cruelty and the bizarre and unreal behaviours of this unaccountable elite which marshals a paradoxical world of Liberalism and slavery are some of the strange aesthetics of the nineteenth-century Brazilian novel as it engages with the nation’s heterodox and articulated economy. Meanwhile Antônio Cândido reads Almeida’s novel Memórias de um sargento de milícias [Memoirs of a Militia Sargent] (first published serially between 1852–3, and as a novel in two volumes in 1854 and 1855) as a text shaped by the erratic social movements of the freemen or agregados who are dependent on favour. Freemen often lived in poverty but had to move amongst the elite on whom they were dependent for favour. For Cândido the constant oscillation between the worlds of order and disorder represented in the novel grasps the basic social dynamic of nineteenth-century Brazil, a country veering between divergent ideologies and political economies.

Bringing together the work of Schwarz and Cândido we see how a range of aesthetics in the nineteenth-century Brazilian novel are shaped by—and capture—the combination of and continuities between parts of society that are institutionalised and non-institutionalised, official and unofficial, licit and illicit, visible and invisible. Using specialist studies on the hybrid, weakly institutionalised aspects of Caribbean and African societies, I attempt to show how Haitian, South African, and Kenyan fiction have also captured the oscillation of precarious workers between client networks and the state, between wage and non-wage labour. The form of this fiction oscillates in a corresponding fashion, between regional and global perspectives, between different linguistic and literary registers, and between different representational schemas and ideologies.

Neoliberalism and World-Literature

Research into informal labour will inevitably analyse how the novel form has responded to neoliberalism’s attack on collective and socially useful labour practices across the world-system. The global turn towards what David Harvey calls “flexible accumulation”—where capital establishes a much more noncommital and casual relationship with labour than under Fordism―that was gradually consolidated throughout the twentieth century has produced a section of the labour force without the protections afforded by formal employment, which often bears the brunt of the neoliberal stripping-away of the social safety net (264). In literary studies that look at responses to global capitalist modernity, a huge amount of attention is paid to cultural registrations of proletarianisation, the exploitation of labour, the appropriation of human labour power as one of nature’s ‘free gifts’, and so on. Michael Taussig’s work on the proletarianisation of neophyte Bolivians in The Devil in Commodity Fetishism in South America; Kerstin Oloff’s work on the ‘zombification’ of labour in Haiti in her essay ‘Zombies, Gender, and World-Ecology’; Roberto Schwarz’s work on how the coexistence of liberal capitalism and slavery underpins the strange aesthetics of Machado de Assis in Master on the Periphery of Capitalism; and Richard Godden’s work on how William Faulkner’s novels register a similar set of conditions in Fictions of Labour are a few examples of studies that show how the capitalist appropriation of labour is a condition with cultural registrations across the modern world-system. A recurrent theme in texts as geographically (and ideologically) disparate as James Kelman’s The Busconductor Hines (1984), to Oonya Kempadoo’s Tide Running (2001), to Ivan Vladislavić’s Portrait with Keys (2006), to Brian Chikwava’s Harare North (2009) is the sense of boredom, frustration, and conflict of interest inherent in work in the (semi-)periphery of the world-system—a zone where there is a large reserve workforce whose labours are being wasted, or oriented towards the market (through meaningless exchange-value production) and away from work on the nations’ materially underdeveloped civic infrastructures.

What do we mean by ‘neoliberalism’, and how can this help us understand culture? As Huehls and Greenwald Smith say in the introduction to their collection Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture, the term can seem “[p]rotean, polymorphous, and frequently perverse”―a shibboleth for “certain left-leaning academics” inclined towards simply “imagining that so-called neoliberalism systematically opposes all things public, collective, and regulatory” (1). In their call for neoliberalism to be more rigorously instrumentalised as a critical tool, Huehls and Greenwald Smith argue for its proper periodisation, contending that “neoliberalism has advanced historically through four different phases or modes: the economic, the political-ideological, the socio-cultural, and the ontological” (3). Huehls and Greenwald Smith go on to argue persuasively for understanding different cultural practices as broadly attempting to manage or mediate the contradictions of these different phases, yet their examples are drawn overwhelmingly from Anglophone core capitalist nations. Whilst their periodisation of neoliberalism effectively challenges the received notion that neoliberalism is a purely ‘Western’ economic project that began with Thatcher’s and Reagan’s privatisations and attacks on organised labour in the 1970s, it tells us very little about the subjective experiences of a loss of, or lack of access to, the “deep, horizontal comradeship”―to use Benedict Anderson’s phrase―of a workforce in the postcolonial world, where collective labour was (and is) such a crucial part of progressive anticolonialist discourses and identities (7).

In this book I broaden the scope of Huehls and Greenwald Smith’s study of neoliberalism: to look at literary registrations of work and its routines outside of the core capitalist nations, in places that have never had the broad, horizontal Fordist schemes of employment or labour organisation that Thatcherism attacked. Put another way, what do neoliberal SAPs or ‘structural adjustment programs’, which orient labour away from the public sector, look and feel like in places like Haiti, South Africa, and Kenya, which have never enjoyed strong welfare states. I draw on the work of scholars such as Frederick Cooper, whose research reveals that elements of what we now recognise as the neoliberal ‘casualisation’ of labour were already evident across colonial Africa, to explore the idea that contemporary world-systemic aesthetics of informality, precarity, and boredom have been globally and historically dispersed and are brought into the world-novel today through what the Warwick Research Collective call “the long waves of the capitalisation of the world” (51).

But how exactly can this be instrumentalised as an interpretative heuristic for literature? A recurrent character across contemporary world-literature is the atomised individual labourer, struggling for a foothold in the chaotic global metropolis; driven to panicked ‘stream of consciousness’ outbursts; attempting to assimilate to a hostile society through hard graft; hoping to redeem the promise of self-sufficiency and/or entry into the officially sanctioned national workforce, a promise that propels the novel forward in search of narrative closure. Here I am thinking of, amongst literally dozens of examples, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow (2006), James Kelman’s The Busconductor Hines (1984), Tao Lin’s Taipei (2013), Masande Ntshanga’s The Reactive (2014), Su Tong’s Rice (1995), Brian Chikwava’s Harare North (2009), Chris Abani’s Graceland (2004), Oonya Kempadoo’s Tide Running (2001), Yu Miri’s Tokyo Ueno Station (2019), Paulo Lins’s City of God (1997), Teju Cole’s Every Day Is for the Thief, Anya Ulinich’s Petropolis (2007), and Arvind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008). The fact that these novels reveal the economic hardship of life in places as disparate and diverse as Kenya, Johannesburg, Glasgow, Rio de Janeiro, Bangalore, Lagos, London, Tobago, Taipei, and New York suggests that the neoliberal paring back of the state, privatisations and asset stripping, economic shock therapy, and the ‘casualisation’ of labour is not merely a ‘Western’ phenomenon but rather a globally disbursed logic.

Yet very similar themes and formal structures appear in parts of the world-system as early as the 1860s in works such as Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866), Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm (1883), Zola’s Germinal (1885), Joseph Conrad’s ‘Youth’, Knut Hamsun’s Hunger (1890), Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), and Lao She’s Rickshaw (1937). The fact that scholars such as Cooper note that elements of neoliberalism appear as early as the 1930s―over forty years before the inauguration of neoliberalism as a purely economic project in the core capitalist nations―raises the question of the periodisation of ‘neoliberalism’. Is it even meaningful to speak of ‘neoliberalism’ (a term generally associated with the more recent developments in global capitalism through which we are all currently living and working) if its elements appear much further back in the history of capitalism? When used in this way, does ‘neoliberalism’ not simply mean ‘late capitalism’ or ‘postmodernism’―terms that many critics have used to show how the present economic moment is a rationalised version of previous phases of accumulation, distinct from, but clearly continuous with, the longue durée? In this book I test one way of meaningfully utilising neoliberalism as a critical tool by following the work of the Warwick Research Collective, namely their urge to think of capitalism as bringing different regimes of accumulation―‘primitive accumulation’ or accumulation by dispossession, liberal bourgeois capitalism, ‘flexible accumulation’―together into uneven combination with one another. The same ‘flexible accumulation’ sanctioned by Thatcher and Reagan, which had the result of ‘casualising’ labour in the core capitalist countries, has been particularly visible across the Caribbean virtually since the Haitian Revolution. Since the structural adjustments of the Caribbean Basin Initiative in 1982, the ‘casualisation’ of labour has manifested as an orientation of labour away from infrastructural development and towards the cultivation of service economy monocultures in places such as Haiti, Saint Lucia, and Tobago, yet the labour of hotel workers on ‘flexible hours’ is often underpinned by large amounts of unpaid domestic labour still overwhelmingly performed by women, which foots the bill of the reproduction of the labour for the service economy. This combination of novel flexible labour in the service economy and (ostensibly!) arcane forms of unpaid labour is what really characterises the neoliberal moment across the Caribbean. Throughout the book I explore the extent to which cultural productions from across the international division of labour help to illuminate the social logic of neoliberalism, with its claim to afford labourers ‘flexibility’, whilst in practice merely appropriating pre-existing forms of free labour. I therefore read informal economies as sites of residue or revival of pre- or non-capitalist forms of sociality, such as non-wage labour, resource distribution through large and complex kinship structures, and so on, combined with capitalist imperatives of individual development or profit, and certain kinds of prestige. The informal is thus a paradigmatic site of uneven and combined development. If we see neoliberalism, not as “a radical rupture in the history of capitalism, but [as] rather a sort of outgrowth of familiar capitalist concerns” (Smith 20–1), we can begin to meaningfully draw comparisons between nineteenth-century Brazilian novels like Antonio de Almedia’s Memórias de um sargento de milícias and Machado de Assis’s Dom Casmurro (1899), and contemporary Caribbean and African fiction like Heading South and Wizard of the Crow because we will understand them each to be responding to similar points in a world-systemic cycle.

Method

Looking at conflicts between divergent ideologies or modes of production across various regions calls for a methodology that considers the relationship between national and international histories. Despite helping us to understand the epistemological impact of colonisation, including the tendency of (post)colonial literary cultures to ‘write back’ to the imperial core and the ongoing crisis of former colonisers’ self-perception, postcolonial studies as a theory of transnational cultural production has had little to say about the world-systemic material unevenness that imperialism consolidated. In “East Isn’t East” Edward Said points out that, while early anticolonial criticism by authors such as C.L.R. James was “based on studies of domination and control made from the standpoint of either a completed political independence or an incomplete liberationist project” in the ‘Third World’, contemporary postcolonialism “stresses the disappearance of the grand narratives of emancipation and enlightenment” (5). Neil Lazarus has shown how postcolonial studies ‘exist[s] in a relationship of supplementarity to “post-” theory’, while its leading commentators “condemn as naïve or, worse, tacitly authoritarian, any commitment to universalism, metanarrative, social emancipation, revolution” (Nationalism 10, 9). Notwithstanding its illuminating work on cultural forms arising from or responding to the corrosive colonialist episteme, postcolonialism has been unable (or unwilling) to formulate an immanent critique of colonialism as a phase of world-systemic capitalist modernisation. For Homi Bhabha, the “hybrid location of cultural value” is the site from which “the postcolonial intellectual attempts to elaborate a historical and literary project” (48). But the frictionless image of cultural hybridity Bhabha valorises conceals the violent processes through which capitalist imperatives have been “graft[ed] on” to other cultures (Knei-Paz 91). In light of the ‘Sewell Report’s’ celebration of “a new story about the Caribbean experience which speaks to the slave period not only being about profit and suffering but how culturally African people transformed themselves into a re-modelled African/Britain” (Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities 8), any critical formation which simply “exalt[s …] migrancy, liminality, hybridity, and multiculturality” assents to the current reactionary climate and will be unable to grasp the systematic violence and dispossession of modernity (Lazarus, Postcolonial 21).

As the emphases of postcolonial studies appear now to cut dangerously close to reactionary establishment dogma, a dissenting method for thinking about imperialism and globalisation transnationally has emerged in the field of International Relations (IR) with the revival of Leon Trotsky’s concept of uneven and combined development. “Despite the decisive importance of U&CD in Trotsky’s writings”, claimed Allinson and Anievas in 2009, “the idea has, until recently, received little attention” (49). We can recognise Lazarus’s critique of the postmodern tenor of postcolonialism in Allinson and Anievas’s critique of IR:

Continually dissatisfied with the ahistorical and asocial premises of mainstream theories of international relations (IR), scholars in the field have turned to the analytical tools of historical sociology. Marxism, traditionally the most critical and historically oriented tradition of social theory, has consequently held a renewed appeal for the discipline. (47)

Allinson and Anievas first confront the epistemological issue of historical critique. While Bhabha speaks from a “presumptive universalism”, taking hybridity, heteroglossia, and in-betweenness as transcendental categories of being and experience (Lazarus, Postcolonial 32), Allinson and Anievas start by confronting the problem: “How can any social theory endogenously explain the causal efficacy of the inter-societal in the constitution of social orders? How can the ‘internal’ (sociological) and ‘external’ (geopolitical) factors in social development be united into a single, coherent explanatory apparatus?” (48). While Bhabha and others uncritically adopt a historical perspective and set of values which celebrate the transitory, the unstable, the nomadic—ignoring how amenable this is to capital—Allinson and Anievas step back and ask how we might immanently critique historical change. The pair propose uneven and combined development as a “‘general abstraction’ through which social theory can capture, as theoretically anterior, the ‘lateral field of causality’ arising from inter-societal relations” (49). This is to read ‘inter-societal relations’—colonisation, structural adjustment, trade war—not as a cross-pollination of cultures or values, but as part of a basic historical process that we can recognise not as a struggle between strong and weak powers (much less superior and inferior cultures), but simply as a series of unequal material exchanges within and between societies. This historical process “is expressed in myriad ways throughout pre-modern history, as well as across differing dimensions and planes of internal differentiation within the ontological, though not yet causally integrated, whole of world-societal development” (50). “In other words”, they say in summary, “the ‘unevenness of historical development’, according to Trotsky, ‘is in itself uneven’ ” (50).

While the theory of uneven and combined development has appeared periodically in Anglo-American literary studies—being taken up as early as the 1980s by Jameson (see Political Unconscious 128, and 205–26), and the 1990s by Lazarus (see Nationalism and Cultural Practice 16, 24–5, 49–51, 79, 176)—Franco Moretti and the Warwick Research Collective are the first scholars to fully elaborate uneven and combined development as an interpretative heuristic. For Moretti the novel is the paradigmatic form of industrial capitalist northwest Europe (Distant Reading 18–19). As imperialism imposes the cultural forms of capitalism on peripheral societies, “a culture starts moving towards the modern novel”, resulting in “a compromise between foreign form and local materials” (“Conjectures” 60). In Modern Epic Moretti gives the example of Cien años de soledad (1967):

Grasped as ‘another story of accelerated modernization and of combined development (239–40) and read through the Blochian lens of the ‘heterogeneity of historical time’, One Hundred Years of Solitude displays for Moretti ‘another version of non-contemporaneity’ in a novel that, like Faust […] ‘tells the story of “incorporation”: of an isolated community that is caught up in the modern world-system, which subjects it to an unexpected, extremely violent acceleration. It is the novel of uneven and combined development’ (243). Evidenced in various technical devices conventionally associated with modernism – digressions, restlessly shifting viewpoints, subversions of conventional causality, chronological disjunction, recursiveness – the form of the novel gestures to the uneven results of forced integration to the modern world-system, exemplifying ‘Macondo’s role in the international division of labour’ (244). The ‘compromise’ represented by the novel’s form registers not the liberally consensual process implied by cultural hybridisation, but, on the contrary, ‘enslavement to monoculture’. It embodies the violence of capitalism, the uneven advance of modernity[.] (qtd. in WReC 54)

The seemingly magical acceleration of time which characterises Cien años describes a rapid and painful kind of social development within a form that tends to describe individual development. Similarly, European modernist tropes are refashioned to describe not inner turmoil as Lukács has it (Eagleton 18), but social shock in a periphery of capitalism. The Colombian experience since European invasion in the late fifteenth century has been characterised by violence, disease, slavery, genocide, resource extraction, and the conversion of the region into an ecological monoculture primed to export cheap raw materials to core capitalist countries. This process involved the imposition of industrial machinery on a variety of agrarian, pastoral, and non-capitalist urban civilisations, thereby “skipping a ‘whole series of intermediate stages’ of development” (Trotsky qtd. in Allinson and Anievas 52). This kind of development characterised by the simultaneity of non-simultaneous phenomena—industrial mining technology amidst a livestock-driven transport infrastructure—finds a correlative cultural registration of uneven combination in texts such as Cien años where an advanced capitalist form like the novel mediates a pre- or partially capitalist local reality. By reading novels from exploited regions of the capitalist world as shaped by and descriptive of unequal material exchanges and the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous, Moretti deploys a method which grasps fiction as uniquely responsive to long, fraught, and uneven inter-societal histories. By thinking comparatively about fiction from across the world in terms of struggle and inequality, rather than in terms of unilateral cultural imperialism or the facile terms of ‘hybridity’, Moretti provides a useful corrective to the pitfalls of some postcolonial criticism.

One group of scholars who have engaged deeply with Moretti’s work is the Warwick Research Collective (WReC), whose 2015 book Combined and Uneven Development attempts to develop his idea of the novel as a world-form. While much of Moretti’s work is successful in challenging the Liberal and postmodern epistemes of comparativist methods, WReC critique his tendency to overlook the shades of grey in the global distribution of wealth and power. WReC challenge Moretti’s characterisation of “literary forms moving uni-directionally from cores to peripheries” (55–6), and his “overstat[ing] the ‘homogeneity’ of conditions in the core territories and regions” (55). While Moretti focuses substantially on ‘major writers’—many of them European, plus a few exemplars from peripheral societies such as García Márquez—WReC attend to a far greater range of writers, such as the Spanish author Pio Baroja and Slovakian author Peter Pišt’anek, who show the heterogeneity of conditions in the core capitalist region of Europe. WReC also depart from the ‘uni-directional’ movement of forms from core to periphery, demonstrating how Dostoevsky, Machado de Assis, and Multatuli develop, from conditions of backwardness, forms which prefigure the ‘innovations’ of high European modernism. I find WReC’s to be a more nuanced and flexible approach than Moretti’s, but by pushing their critique of Moretti further I think we can do better still. For while Moretti polarises the core and periphery of the world-system thereby overlooking nuances of cultural production in semi-peripheral zones such as Brazil, South Africa, and India, WReC limit their correction of this tendency to an exploration of the European literary periphery on the one hand and Sudan on the other (the chapter on South African author Ivan Vladislavic is a crucial exception). Similarly, in showing how forms and ideas travel from (semi-)periphery to core, for example, WReC rely on Lukács’s work on Dostoevsky and Schwarz’s work on Machado. Here I attend to the nuances of cultural and critical production in (semi-)peripheral regions by looking in more detail at the writers’ and critics’ consciousness of uneven conditions and to one specific way in which capitalist relations have been lived across the world-system. In Chap. 2, for example, I suggest that Brazilian critic Antônio Cândido’s work on Brazilian fiction contains a world-literary reading model which predates the work of Schwarz and prefigures the Anglo-American turn to uneven and combined development.

Case Studies

In this book I hone in on one structural analogue of several regional histories: economic informality. Cândido, Carvalho Franco, and Schwarz have all shown how the coexistence of slavery and bourgeois capitalism in Brazil produced a large surplus labour force of free people who became dependent on forms of non-wage work. This uneven and combined development was brought about by the colonisation of the area today known as Brazil by Portugal, which had emerged from early modern European power struggles with naval supremacy (Burns 20). The 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas ‘gave’ the eastern seaboard of South America to Portugal, and thereafter Atlantic trade financed the nation’s shift from a heavily agrarian to a mercantile economy (Burns 22–3). As British naval supremacy eclipsed Portugal’s in a subsequent accumulation cycle of the world-system (Arrighi 220), Britain became guarantors of the Portuguese Empire. With enslaved peoples brought from Portuguese Angola, Brazil became a sugar monoculture (Burns 42–3). When the European crisis of the Napoleonic wars threatened Portugal, the court of Dom João moved to Rio de Janeiro under British naval protection (Bethell 57), meaning that Portugal was able to exploit royal prestige to resist British calls for abolition, which would have harmed sugar profits (Bethell 59). Brazil won independence in 1822, and the politically powerful latifundia of the untethered nation ensured that the transition away from slavery was as slow as possible. Due in part to the inter-societal struggles of Europe, then, Brazil would become a nation that was agrarian yet with a strong transnational mercantile class, slaveowning yet bourgeois.

This uneven and combined development informed Brazilian culture. “[W]e were an agrarian and independent country”, writes Schwarz, “divided into latifundia, whose productivity depended on the one hand on slave labour and on the other on a foreign market” (“Misplaced Ideas” 20). Brazil was thus a country of “bourgeois economic thinking”—given that the economy was oriented towards “international trade”—“which had become independent not long ago in the name of French, English and American liberal ideas”, but “with equal necessity, this ideological ensemble had to be at war with slavery and its defenders and yet live with them” (“Misplaced Ideas” 20). This articulated economy created a class of free people or agregados, who had a bizarre ideological relationship to the ruling class: “[n]either proprietor nor proletarian” they could not sell their labour in a slave economy, so “the free man’s access to social life and its benefits depended, in one way or another, on the favour of a man of wealth and power” (“Misplaced Ideas” 22). This impacted Brazilian culture because:

[f]avour was present everywhere, combining itself with more or less ease to administration, politics, industry, commerce, the life of the city, the court, and so on. Even professions, such as medicine, or forms of skilled labour, such as printing, which in Europe were on the whole free of favour, were among us governed by it. As the professional depended on favour to exercise his profession, so the small proprietor depended on it for the security of his property, and the public servant for his position. Favour was our quasi-universal social mediation – and being more appealing than slavery, the other relationship inherited from colonial times, it is understandable that our writers based their interpretation of Brazil upon it, thereby unwittingly disguising the violence that had always been essential to the sphere of production. (“Misplaced Ideas” 22)

For Schwarz, the Brazilian worker’s place in the labour market depended neither on merit nor on the production of surplus value, but on maintaining the favour of the ‘big men’ in sprawling patron-client networks. Maintaining favour required a delicate performance, balancing an outward appearance of equality before the law in homage to the liberal tenets of the nation, while remaining in practice subordinate to the caprice of one’s patron.

Liberalism, which had been an ideology well grounded in appearances, came to stand for the conscious desire to participate in a reality that appearances could not sustain. When he justified arbitrariness by means of some ‘rational’ reason, the beneficiary consciously exalted himself and his benefactor, who, in turn, had no motive to contradict him, rationality being the highest value of the modern world. Under these conditions, which side believed in the justification? (“Misplaced Ideas” 24)

So a social informality pervaded nineteenth-century Brazil, where agregados—little better than slaves in this crushingly hierarchical society—had to be superficially treated and behave as equals of their bourgeois or noble benefactors. We see this in Dom Casmurro when the decorated minister Father Cabral and José Dias, the Santiago household’s agregado, debate the role of vocation in clerical work. Cabral’s argument is manifestly contradictory, but the subtle weight of his nobility crushes his opponent, who was obliged to participate in a ‘debate between equals’ in this uniquely relaxed and informal society, despite also being structurally disqualified from winning it. Schwarz grasps this informality, which is in fact a displacement of coercion and violence, as a social and cultural result of Brazil’s uneven and combined development.

In this book I look at examples of informality arising from histories of uneven and combined development in Brazil, Haiti, South Africa, Kenya, the U.S. and U.K. By doing so we see that, just as WReC show conditions are not homogeneous in the core capitalist countries, conditions are not homogeneous in the (semi-)periphery either—writers (and their characters) are forced to strategically balance the conflicting imperatives in starkly articulated economies, shuttle between the realms of privilege and poverty, and engage ingeniously in the vast patron-client networks through which resources are distributed. In Chap. 2, I take Cândido’s 1970 essay on Memórias de um sargento de milícias, “Dialéctica da Malandragem” [“Dialectic of Malandroism”], to be an early example of the informal in fiction grasped as a world-systemic feature. The novel follows Leonardo, a young trickster figure or malandro, as he moves between a variety of households and jobs—both precarious and illustrious—in early nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro. The environment engendered by the malandro’s circulation through the full gamut of Regency-era Rio—which I will read as an environment of informality—constitutes, for Cândido, the objective form of the novel. For Schwarz and Edu Teruki Otsuka, Almeida’s organisation of the novel around local conditions, including its “capricious balancing” of slavery and liberal ethics (Cândido “Malandroism”, 95), abdicates all moral authority, leaving the text in a cul-de-sac of literary history. I attempt to nuance this reading by showing how Machado de Assis’s 1899 novel Dom Casmurro follows Almeida in using local manifestations of uneven development as a formal principle, but in this case Machado integrates the exploitative relations of informality into the structure and interpersonal relations of the novel. I show the agregado José Dias’s integral role in the plot structure of a novel shaped by the tragic victory in Brazil of the most regressive historical currents. Dom Casmurro shows the role that informality plays in a total social process of sclerotic modernisation.Footnote 3

Representations of intermediate classes of casual workers and freemen appear in other slave societies that were externally oriented towards the world market. In Patrick Chamoiseau’s extraordinary novel Texaco (1992) a roving band of carpenters headed by Théodorus Sweetmeat criss-cross Martinique fixing houses, crafting coffins, and hiring themselves out wherever required. Théodorus is described as a flexible labourer who has worked all over the “the brand new world”:

he had been a navy carpenter, then he worked on a Dutch island following a shipwreck, and-then was a buccaneer, and-then a militiaman God knows where, and-then the ruined owner of a little farm in some hole in Guadeloupe, and-then sailor on some God-knows-what floating thing in the Mexican Gulf. (56–7)

Théodorus is a product of the unregulated casual job market of the colonial world, and in this spirit he draws together some of the freemen of Martinique to live as itinerant labourers. Just as Leonardo shuttles between the poles of order and disorder, poverty and prestige, in Memórias, Théodorus shifts constantly between “the overseers’ quarters, with wheat bread, some modest Bordeaux wine, and dry sausages from Alsace” (57), and his sexual exploits among the enslaved women on the plantations (55–6). Eventually the carpenters build a kind of boarding house for affranchis or freed people, some of whom work in the island’s hidden economy of sex work (64–6), and as the affranchi economy grows, Esternome—the narrator’s father—ends up doing a huge amount of work expanding ‘the City’. This story about the affranchis’ contribution to the island and ‘the City’ makes Texaco a “collective bildungsroman” told by Marie-Sophie in an effort to convince a city planner not to demolish the eponymous township (Rubenstein 35). Texaco itself is a community of casual labourers, odd-job men, hired help, muscle, and sex workers, and the fact that Marie-Sophie’s narrative moves the urban planner to spare the town and plug it into the electricity grid suggests a recognition of the role of non-routinised, non-Fordist, non-Taylorist forms of labour throughout Martinican history. Several of Texaco’s key characters, its overall plot structure, and its very form shift constantly between ‘the City’ and the plantation, or ‘the City’ and the township, all of which is conveyed through the imported European Bildungsroman form. Here then we have a Caribbean manifestation of a dialectic of order and disorder.

Scholars such as Sidney Mintz have shown how, like Brazil, the Caribbean was turned by colonial forces into sugar, rum, and coffee monocultures, which “served as low-cost, high-energy food substitutes that helped cheapen the living costs of the labouring classes in the core” (Campbell and Niblett 3). The region’s integration into the world-system as a source of cheap commodities and labour has made the Caribbean a paradigmatic case of uneven and combined development, featuring a dearth of civic infrastructure (as explored in Pauline Melville’s “Erzulie” (1998) and Earl Lovelace’s Salt (1996)) and enormous wealth disparities. The long history of the region’s unevenness and economic informality is captured in Texaco, but unlike in the Brazilian novel—which has always focused on the malandro and the agregado—the figures of economic informality have received less attention in Caribbean fiction. Jamaican critic Sylvia Wynter’s concept of ‘plot and plantation’ can still help us attune to the non-wage and favour-based domestic economies that existed within export-oriented regions. For Wynter, the Caribbean was a market-oriented plantation society, whose enslaved labourers simultaneously maintained an “autochthonous” system of producing goods for communal use, “what we shall call the plot system” (96). Yet people operating in this economy—especially after abolition—would have to compromise with market imperatives (101). Initially this articulation of plot and plantation imperatives will not gain the density of the Brazilian economy of favour, but it appears superficially as content from the 1930s. Interclass affairs, clientelist landlords, and non-wage economic activity appear in C.L.R. James’s Minty Alley (1936), while Alfred Mendes’s Pitch Lake (1934) sees Joe da Costa ascend through the circles of Trinidad’s Portuguese community. But Mendes, in particular, simply inverts Almeida’s model of organising the novel around local conditions and inserts Trinidad life into a fable about the spiritual emptiness of social mobility. In Jacques Roumain’s Gouverneurs de la roseé [Masters of the Dew] (1944), Manuel, a migrant worker, returns to his Haitian home and attempts to unite the peasantry, the farmers, the poor, and others into a collective that can stand against the world-economic waves breaking on the nation’s shores. Manuel’s vision is one of progressive domestic modernisation, managed by organised labour, and articulated (initially) within an indigenous metaphysical episteme. As Michael Dash argues, “Roumain wished to see in the coumbite a modern-day ‘Bois-Caïman’ ceremony where the transfer from the sacred to the secular is made and masses mobilized using an ancient rite” (14). In imagining the whole of Haitian society, Roumain has recourse to something like Cândido’s dialectic of order and disorder, in which the diverse cultural and ritual energies of Haiti become an integral part of the modernising, secular nation state. Meanwhile Ralph de Boissière’s Crown Jewel (1952) uses interclass and interracial relationships to symbolise “the alliance between black and brown middle classes and the working-class masses” and George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin (1953) “conveys a similar sense of fluidity” as “rigid colonial hierarch[ies]” break down (Niblett 54).

In the wake of failed or compromised postcolonial nationalist projects which sought to integrate ethnically diverse societies and redistribute resources, Caribbean fiction confronted class division and the uneven integration of nonsynchronous social forms. Using Schwarz’s class-based critique of fiction, we can see the emergence of intermediate classes forced to shift between the privileged and deprivileged poles of postcolonial society in novels like Lovelace’s The Wine of Astonishment (1982) in which the villagers of Bonasse “have managed to maintain an alternative habitus to that imposed by the colonial order” (Niblett 83). They organise their resistance through the church, but “the form of collectivity embodied in the church has not been generalized to the rest of society, which remains structured along imperialist lines” (Niblett 85). As the villagers are forced to balance the twin imperatives of use-value-oriented rural society and exchange-value-oriented market society (a form of Wynter’s dialectic of ‘plot and plantation’), the novel works through a similar set of structural contradictions faced by Brazilian fiction of the bourgeois-yet-slaveowning era. After the structural adjustment of Caribbean economies by neoliberal policies such as the Caribbean Basin Economic Recovery Act (CBERA), which sought to stimulate “export-oriented growth” (Clark and Schaur 286), tourism floods into the region, resulting in bodies and ecologies being fetishised and drawn into exploitative interracial, interclass, and international relationships. Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place (1988), Pauline Melville’s The Migration of Ghosts (1998), and Oonya Kempadoo’s Tide Running (2001) explore the sexual and class politics of one such set of relationships. In the latter, attractive young brothers Cliff and Ossie share casual relationships with people from across Tobago until Cliff’s relationship with Bella, a middle-class woman from the island, and Peter, a corporate lawyer, becomes increasingly transactional. When some cash goes missing from the couple’s home they become suspicious that Cliff is stealing from them, exposing bourgeois fears about the dangers of intimacy with their working-class victims. The novel concludes with Cliff stealing the couple’s car and going on a rampage around the island. As the narrative slips into an unsettled stream of consciousness, we are led to believe that Cliff suffers from kleptomania—his unconscious response to cross-class intimacy was to steal, and this desire has now burst forth in a flurry of property destruction. The novel begins to grasp the region as a faultline in the seismic shifts of neoliberalisation, where meetings of local precariats and transnational elites are seen as articulating world-systemic velocities. But the deferral of Cliff’s desire to redress class disparities through his relationship with Bella and Peter to mental illness pathologises an authentic resentment and suspends its political horizon.

In Chap. 3 I argue that Dany Laferrière’s Heading South succeeds where Tide Running fails. The novel follows poor young Haitians as they oscillate between the various social spaces of the nation in order to pursue casual sexual relationships with wealthy elites and foreign tourists. The various narrative strands are woven through a fragmentary structure which obliquely gestures towards the nation’s sexual economy—while Charlie sleeps with Missie Abel to help his relatives remain living as domestic servants in her family home, the Magic Boys provide an auxiliary sex work service in a beachfront hotel. Laferrière follows previous Caribbean authors in representing discrepant classes, but crucially he also confronts the complex, dynamic, occasionally illicit interactions between these classes and how this might be structurally integral to a national economy. Haiti has “one of the most liberal trade regimes in the world”, thus exacerbating colonial-era disparities documented in earlier Caribbean fiction discussed above (Hallward 6). The massive and exhausted precariat must criss-cross the city engaging in wage and non-wage labour, siphoning off value from anyone who possess it through licit or illicit means. And while the transnational elite are “barricaded behind walls of paranoia and contempt”, they are also dependent on the domestic working-class whom they exploit as hired help or sex workers (Hallward 3). The novel’s constant shifts between working-class homes, tennis clubs, and ambassadorial estates grasp the objective social dynamic of Haiti, one where the privileged and deprivileged poles of the international division of labour meet in an ostensibly informal environment, but one which obscures an exploitative and violent world-systemic struggle. Thus we witness a Haitian dialectic of order and disorder. Yet formally we see Wynter’s dialectic of plot and plantation in the novel as well. Much like in Memórias, the overall feel of the novel is one of relaxed and humorous interaction between discrepant classes. But Oana Sabo’s work on Laferrière’s complex relationship to francophone culture shows that the novel performs elements of French High literature whilst also gesturing towards the local realities that this form is unable to capture.

For many scholars the informal economies of Africa are paradigmatic of social and economic formations produced by the pressures of colonialism and capitalist liberalisation. For Harold Wolpe, apartheid was the codification of a violent state infrastructure seeking to coerce Black workers to continue to work for wages “below the cost of [their] reproduction” as labour, even while such a political economy gradually destroyed the pre-capitalist communities it exploited (434). The fact that the ANC’s neoliberal Growth, Employment and Redistribution policy (GEAR) swiftly followed the apartheid regime has meant that any serious redistribution of resources was foreclosed and the racial capitalism of minority rule has remained intact. Indeed for Jane Poyner, “the new South Africa looks depressingly too much like the old” (5), and recent fiction has foregrounded attempts to live outside of the feeble protections of both the ‘can’t do’ state and the nation’s rapidly growing corporate sector. In light of what Martin Murray has called South Africa’s deferred post-apartheid revolution where the state failed to deliver economic improvement to the nation’s racial majority (3–4), a pervasive disillusionment with formal political and economic institutions has made the informal sector (including the kasi or township markets, and extra-legal ventures) seem the only viable options for many. While scholars such as Jane Guyer, Filip de Boeck, and AbdouMaliq Simone have celebrated the functional, democratic aspects of South Africa’s informal sector, recent fiction has explored the troubling world-historic pressures which shape it, its oft exploited precariat, and the extent to which it supports as well as challenges the hegemonic forces it seeks to escape. In Chap. 4 I argue that Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup (2001) grasps economic informality as the fetish of a liberal elite, while Masande Ntshanga’s The Reactive (2014) sees it as an attempt to escape the imperatives of both traditional community and capital, whilst ironically bringing them into uneven combination.

Given South Africa’s colonial history, and subsequent apartheid regime, the country has combined disparate modes of production and social forms in a comparable way to Brazil. Just as the patriarchal ‘Big House’, both bourgeois and slaveholding, was the paradigmatic monad of nineteenth-century Brazil (Freyre 31), for J.M. Coetzee large extended families formed in rural South Africa: “about each farmer-patron there comes to cluster a band of dependents and hangers-on doing little work and getting the poorest of wages” (White Writing 31). The colonial- and apartheid-era structure of South African society, shaped by world-systemic imperatives, generated a local iteration of clientelism and favour, whose cultural results I analyse as an index of combined unevenness. I draw on a wide range of scholarship to argue that apartheid and the subsequent transition to neoliberalism maintained “cheap black labour” for an (initially) white elite trading “maize and gold” on the global market (Alexander 22). This was achieved through the “political balkanisation of African societies into bounded tribes and, subsequently ‘homelands’ or ‘Bantustans’”, whose inhabitants would have to travel into wealthy white enclaves for work (Dubow 42). Many workers thus existed in a state of migrancy, oscillating between domestic work in white suburbs, mine labour, and their strategically underdeveloped ‘homelands’. I discuss how short fiction published in magazines such as Staffrider registers this oscillation between the worlds of order and disorder generated by apartheid. This frenzied criss-crossing of social landscapes in search of subsistence remains a feature of The Pickup and The Reactive—while Ibrahim pays in kind for a squalid room behind the garage in which he is illegally employed, Lindanathi and his friends shuttle between HIV and drug support groups attempting to sell antiretroviral drugs.

The state-driven attempt to suppress the social progress of people on the arbitrary basis of physical characteristics generated a local iteration of what Schwarz, writing about Brazil, calls an economy of favour. One of the aims of apartheid, argues Louw, “was to rerank Afrikaners upward within Milner’s racial-capitalist order and end the “consuming sense of inferiority” that Afrikaners felt in the face of “the dismaying affluence of the English” (34). Afrikaner labour was the chief beneficiary of a deeply paternalistic and interventionist state, and all labour had to engage with this culture of clientelism if it wanted to maintain favour. “The homeland policy gave birth to a large parasitic network of black bureaucrats who were part of an apartheid patronage system” (Louw 82). Crucially, it is the persistence of this racialised clientelism under democracy that haunts The Reactive—Nathi jadedly remarks that “it didn’t take much to go to school for free, in those days, or rather to trade on the pigment we were given to carry” (7). While South Africa’s disturbing racial history forecloses much comparison with the ostensibly relaxed informality of Brazil, the post-apartheid discourse of rainbowism—concealing ongoing racialised economic rifts—appears parallel to the contradictory articulated economy noted by Schwarz.

In The Reactive Nathi seemingly deliberately contracts HIV while working in a lab, then sells the antiretroviral drugs he receives on a private health-care plan provided as part of his severance package. For Andrew van der Vlies, Nathi is both a precarious figure in an interstitial economy and an ideal neoliberal subject—resourceful, flexible, and self-sufficient. This informal work defers both participation in the corporate sector and his ulwaluko or circumcision which would make him a man in the eyes of his family. Nathi is therefore akin to the figure of the kòbòlò as described by Ato Quayson in his work on the informal sector in Accra: a figure “in a structural transition between socially acceptable age-related activities” with an “attachment to street life” (emphasis in original, 199). The kòbòlò is one of the key figures in this sector, for Quayson, someone who must “be between short-term, low-paying jobs in the informal economy”, and—whilst it is not a defining feature—“may spend the night on the street” (200). I argue that Ntshanga represents these figures and the informal sector more generally as structurally integral to the neoliberal economy, with the very form of the novel throbbing between different social structures and reality effects, in a local iteration of the dialectic of order and disorder. While many African writers have foregrounded this dynamic, I find that Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow (2006) represents at the level of form what Chabal and Daloz have called “the political instrumentalization of disorder” (xviii). The characteristic shape and dynamic of such disorder has its origins in Kenya’s colonial period; in Sorrenson’s history of the European settlement of the region, for instance, he shows how colonisation lurched forward largely as a secondary effect of Britain’s broader colonial strategy. Claims to the headwaters of the Nile were made in order to protect Egypt and the Suez trade route, and extracting value from this area necessitated transport links between the interior and the port of Mombasa (8–10). Disagreements between the British state and capital over who should pay for this infrastructure resulted in a situation where the land around a railway line had to be settled in order to cultivate a tax base, leading to European settlement “almost [by] accident” and through “a private bargain” between the various stakeholders (Lonsdale and Berman 34). Laying claim to this land resulted in violent incursions by colonial forces and settlers, and in the process the British formed strategic alliances with various indigenous groups which would fuel resentments for decades after. But given the resulting proximity of settlers and the dispossessed, an economy of squatting was established (Lonsdale and Berman 93). Such a haphazard process of ‘modernisation’, I argue, shapes the formal structure of a text like Wizard of the Crow. For Simon Gikandi, Ngũgĩ places himself “at the junction where history (the context) and his writings (the text) meet” (Ngũgĩ 3). He allows Wizard of the Crow to be formally shaped by objective conditions of African modernisation. By constantly shuttling between the Ruler’s palace, the streets, the offices of a plutocrat, the poor suburbs, and eventually abroad, the narrative dynamic of Wizard embodies the movement of the kòbòlò trying to survive and balance different jobs in the informal economy. Yet the formal structure, driven by the arbitrary and haphazard despotism of the Ruler and his consiglieri, proceeds according to a logic of ‘political disorder’ that Ngũgĩ reveals to be the result of a political economy dependent on the informal and the ad hoc. The informal structure of society in the novel, in which “the public and the private spheres largely overlap”, allows the very meaning of a flexible, improvisatory civic space to be contested (Chabal and Daloz 9). I draw on Grace Musila’s work on the counter-hegemonic potential of rumour in African societies, and Cohen and Odhiambo’s concept of counter publics, to argue that Wizard opens up space to imagine the role of informality in anti-imperialist struggle. Like his South African counterparts, Ngũgĩ is keenly aware of the exploitative potential within the informal economy, but following Luise White’s work on how hegemonic vocabularies and practices can be strategically contested by their victims, I suggest that Wizard thinks through how the sector might provide a platform for political resistance.

Finally, in Chap. 6 I turn to the impact of economic informality on cultural production from core regions of the world-system. While postcolonial theory has “ratif[ied] this baleful conception” of ‘the West’ as somehow the home of an ideal-typical modernity, free from the anomalies of corruption and favour, I pick two examples of texts frequently associated with the ‘civilisational’ project of European modernity—Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891)—and demonstrate the formal impact that a variant of economic informality has on these texts (WReC 14). While the postwar interlude of social democracy did much to shift the burden of socially reproductive labour onto public institutions in the United Kingdom and the United States, for Melinda Cooper a confluence of neoliberal and neoconservative political economy that came to prominence between the 1960s and 1980s deferred social reproduction back onto the family (8–9). So extreme has been this deferral under austerity that the cultural features observed in (semi-)peripheral fiction such as the oscillation of characters between various sources of value in order to secure social reproduction can now be observed in more broadly Liberal and conventional cultural production such as Sharon Horgan and Holly Walsh’s Motherland (2016). Cooper’s model of the twin poles of Euro-American political economy is hugely instructive in our reading of post-1980s fiction. Genre fiction of the 1990s in Britain, for example, clearly internalises the neoconservative construction of the family as a natural zone of hygienic social reproduction, but one utterly petrified by the encroaching threat of the precarity and dependency of young family units amid the privatisation of social housing and soaring unemployment in the Thatcher era and after. I show how Madeline St John’s The Essence of the Thing (1997) is preoccupied with the breakdown of the clean and safe heterosexual family while strategically repressing the forms of informality and precarity that attend this social process. By contrast, texts such as Brian Chikwava’s Harare North (2014) and Hilary Leichter’s Temporary (2020) attempt to represent the rise of economic informality through irrealist aesthetics. The point here is that, contrary to Moretti’s assumption that cultural forms such as the novel move uni-directionally from core to periphery, the formal attenuations and aesthetic features of economic informality have largely flowed from the periphery—where experiments in paying wages below the cost of the reproduction of labour were conducted—to the core of the world-system.

One unifying aspect of the novels is their apparent unseriousness. As Cândido notes of Memórias, life in the relaxed and informal realm often seems like a ‘joke’. As I discuss in Chap. 2, this is partly to do with the fact that Almeida was writing in a journal for the urban bourgeoisie, some of whom would have been slaveowners, some of whom would have been involved in the casual lawlessness depicted in the novel. Almeida himself lived in, and thereby indirectly profited from, the slave society of Brazil at the time, and he could therefore summon no moral authority to castigate it. Any critique of the economic informality of Brazil is thus highly oblique, and it is this same tone that we find throughout the other novels. In Chap. 3 I note the apparently humorous scenes in which local Haitian boys have cheeky exchanges with bourgeois women and tourists. The enjoyably salacious nature of these relationships, exemplified by the fact that many of them are explicitly sexual, displaces a seriously unequal exchange between two people with completely different social and material protections. Contained within these relationships, I argue, is an oblique critique of the structurally unequal economic relations of the world-system, but the subtlety required by Laferrière in making it reveals his own fraught position as a Haitian author, living in Canada, and writing in French, who wants his works to be appreciated as examples of Francophone literature. Similarly, for Andrew van der Vlies, Lindanathi seems to choose to live precariously in The Reactive. Can his protest against family and capital really be taken seriously if he could comfortably reintegrate himself with both of them? Nathi’s only ever semi-serious life in the informal economy risks seeming farcical when in fact it indexes a very real sense of deep disaffection with post-apartheid South Africa and its failure to integrate various communities within a more flexible idea of the nation than the neoliberal model affords. ‘Tutto nel mondo è burla’. Everything in the world is a joke. But for Cândido, “É burla e é sério”; it is a joke, and it is serious (82).