My fifth book is a co-edited anthology of essays by Franco Moretti, Neil Brenner, Helen Stacey, Gopal Balakrishnan, Kären Wigen, Immanuel Wallerstein and others that reassesses the work of Immanuel Wallerstein. Immanuel Wallerstein and the Problem of the World: System, Scale, Culture (Duke University Press, 2011), co-edited with Bruce Robbins and Nirvana Tanoukhi, contains contributions from a distinguished group of scholars from the fields of history, sociology, geography, law and literature. Each piece speaks to how world-systems analysis can be critically adapted to world-scale cultural studies.
Reviewing this volume, Etienne Balibar writes, “As the current crisis of financial markets displays both its high level of economic uncertainty and its devastating geopolitical consequences—with East and West, North and South progressively trading their places—the prescience of Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis appears admirable. But the authors of this book also demonstrate that it potentially affects the basic time-space determinants of every cultural critique. A timely and fruitful contribution.”
