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Crises of the Universal in Anglophone Literatures and Criticism (19th-21st centuries)

Introduction

Caroline Pollentier, Antonia Rigaud, Ronan Ludot-Vlasak and John DeWitt

Abstracts

In his recent book Universaliser: Pour un dialogue des cultures (2024), Souleymane Bachir Diagne invites us to “reinvent the universal” (Diagne 11-26) by considering it in relation to the “plural of the world” (116). The present collection of articles seeks to acknowledge the necessity of a major theoretical decentering, while also exploring a plurality of other critiques of the universal, including those that may be situated prior to or even in the margins of postcolonial critique. It proposes to understand how debates over the universal resurface between and within critical fields and find particular resonance in the plural ecologies of literary forms, and in Anglophone literature in particular.

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1In his recent book Universaliser: Pour un dialogue des cultures (2024), Souleymane Bachir Diagne invites us to “reinvent the universal” by considering it in relation to the “plurality of the world.” Diagne asks us to look at the universal as a continual process, more like a verb than a fixed noun. In the 20th century, the universalist paradigm was put in crisis by thinkers of the black radical tradition such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon, then by African-American feminists, who were marginalized both from the women's movement because of their skin color, and from the civil rights movement because of their gender. The epistemological crisis wrought by postcolonial studies beginning in the 1970s, and currently by decolonial studies, is a testament to a deep disenchantment with the category of universality, which is sometimes understood as an unkept promise of equality that is actually quick to break into violence. According to Antoine Lilti, the critique of the “tension between universalism and Eurocentrism” (109) concerns three points: the complicity of certain works of the Enlightenment with colonial ideology, the confiscation of universalism by Western thinkers who reduce other voices to silence, and finally, the pretensions to universality of a discourse that is in fact geographically and historically situated. In their reassessment of the blind spots of universalism inherited from the Enlightenment, critics such as Edward Said, Dipesh Chakrabarty or Gayatri Spivak have foregrounded the Eurocentrism of universalist thought, revealing murky connections between the Enlightenment’s claim to universality, the colonial enterprise and the racialized discourse that underlies it.

2The present collection of articles seeks to acknowledge the necessity of a major theoretical decentering, while also exploring a plurality of other critiques of the universal, including those that may be situated prior to or even in the margins of postcolonial critique. The crisis of the universal involves and incites other crises of the modern subject, the discourse of humanism, and the belief in progress. It shakes up an entire host of traditions that Western cultures have largely taken for granted until the end of the 20th century, revealing the forms of domination and exclusion that a universal truth is liable to impose on minority identities. Once the banner of modernity’s champions, the universal is no longer the prerogative of the moderns. Do these critical crises render the very concept of universalism inoperative, or do they invite us to reconsider it according to other methods and epistemologies? While the notion of a universalist ideal now appears suspect, are there other forms or possibilities for its reconfiguration?

3We propose to suspend binary schema by bringing universalism into dialogue with a variety of concepts such as singularity, plurality, heterogeneity, individuality, and the local. The question is how Anglophone literatures and criticism in particular “complicate” (Cassin 12), “pluralize” (Delmas-Marty 29), or “decolonize” (Suaudeau and Niang 62) the universal. This issue considers how the crisis of the universal does not only involve an unequivocal rejection of the concept, but also opens up the possibility of “questioning it” (Milner 9) and of evaluating its power in more ways than as a homogenizing and silencing force. Part of this reappraisal has involved offering alternative conceptions to Enlightenment universalism and its underlying Eurocentrism. Postcolonial and decolonial criticism, for example, put this account of universalism in crisis as it opens onto a “pluriverse” (Escobar 4) of cultures and literatures that accommodates a multiplicity of entangled realities. The emphasis on plurality in this approach could be put in a fruitful dialogue with the notion of “postcolonial universalism” (26), as Julien Suaudeau and Mame-Fatou Niang understand it. In their view, the critique of classical universalism and its colonial underpinnings must give way to a “universalism that is commensurate with the world” (26), and more specifically with the irreducible difference it is composed of. With the unifying principle of the uni-verse thus undermined, the question of scale (the individual, the nation, etc.) takes on a different status from that of the Enlightenment, as the particular basis from which universal principles can be abstracted and generalized.

4To address this rescaling of the universal, this special issue stages a critical dialogue between postcolonial studies, gender studies and ecocriticism, situating the universal at the contested borders of multiple critical fields. As Patrick Colm Hogan noted in his exploration of “literary universals,” “[t]oday there is little enthusiasm among humanists for the study of universals” (223). With critical theory, the humanities have wholeheartedly embraced difference—be it in terms of class, race, gender, or disability. But the promotion of difference and identitarian singularity does not necessarily eclipse universalism—nor is universalism synonymous with the end of critique. Instead, difference may be invigorated by the test of the universal, by its failures and lacunae. The universal, as such, is not only an object of critique but also a modality of critique, a testing ground for various critical positions within the humanities—and within their distinct critical fields.

5In gender studies, the universal has mostly been exposed as an androcentric construct of identityOyèrónkẹ Oyěwùmí also shows how “women” is not a universal category, but a Western myth imposed upon African cultures. Drawing on postcolonial theory, Oyěwùmí opposes biological universalism, claiming that “feminism is one of the last theoretical fashions to be applied to African societies” (16). But the promotion of anti-universalism has also been put to the test by queer theory. Questioning the gender politics of difference, Madhavi Menon makes the theoretical bet of a “queer universalism” by pursuing the ethics of being “indifferent to difference.” Paradoxically enough, “like universalism, queerness too is marked by a desire that refuses the contours of a fixed body” (17). While the affective position of indifference carries to an extreme the critique of anti-universalism—or anti-anti-universalism, as we may call it after Fredric Jameson’s “anti-anti-utopianism” (xvi)—it sheds valuable light on the paradoxes underpinning these reformulations of universalism. This vexed relation between universalism and anti-universalism is perhaps nowhere as evident as in the field of ecocriticism. By rallying to the theory of the Anthropocene, the environmental humanities have rescaled the subject and reconfigured the collective to planetary proportions. The notion of a “common ancestry of all extant cellular life” (Moody et al.), identified in the 1990s as the Last Universal Common Ancestor, has also validated the evolutionary narrative of an originary life. But the idea of universal life and of global geological change hasn’t eclipsed territorial politics of singularity. Rather than shaping humanity as an indistinct geological force, ecocriticism has alternatively pointed to capitalism and colonialism as major agents of climate degradation. Arturo Escobar’s call for a decolonial ecology based on non-dichotomic “thinking-feeling” (2016) embodies such attempts at promoting anti-hegemonic struggles grounded in locality.

6The present collection proposes to understand how such debates over the universal across, between and within critical fields find particular resonance in literary forms—and in Anglophone literature in particular, as a literature that is written in locally rooted language that has imposed itself as a universally spoken language, a lingua franca. How do English-language literatures reconfigure the place of the local and the particular in relation to the universal? How do they articulate the tension between the unifying and generalizing operations of classical universalism, on the one hand, and the insistence on irreducible particularity on the other? In the past two decades, new developments in literary studies have alternatively unveiled the limitations of purely historicist readings or championed a more systematic approach to form. In an essay published in 2008, Samuel Otter already contended that “something has been going on in literary studies having to do with ‘form’ and ‘aesthetics,’ and, surprisingly, it has been going on for almost twenty years” (Otter 118). This critical shift, mapped out by Marjorie Levinson in “What Is New Formalism?” and continued by Caroline Levine, implies neither a return to New Criticism nor a rejection of historically grounded readings. Rather, it offers the possibility of investigating form historically and shedding light on the politics of texts through a dialogical analysis of their formal texture—a critical concern that is variously addressed throughout this issue, across various literary genres. As a whole, this special issue grounds the universal in an open-ended reflection on form, understood as “both containing and plural, both portable and situated” (Levine 6).

7The inaugural essay of this collection urges us to revise our critical assumptions about the universal but also to question the premises of its critiques. At the intersection of gender studies and decolonial studies, Sandeep Bakshi argues that standard queer discourse has become dominant, so much so that it has morphed into a normative category of anti-normativity. Instead of positing the queer as an alternative to universalism, he demonstrates that queer theorisation has fossilized into a paradoxical modality of coloniality. As queer models and tropes from the global North have eclipsed particularisms from the global South, “the global South is corralled into a teleological relationship with the global North as the leader of queer universalisms.” In this potent work of decolonial critique, Bakshi advocates a renewed attention to “queer particulars” that accommodates “the plurality of our planetary existences.” In her critical genealogy of motherhood and mothering, Apolline Weibel continues this reconsideration of the nexus between gender and the universal. Drawing on psychoanalysis, feminism, and queer studies, Weibel dismantles the patriarchal myth of the universal mother while pointing out the limitations of the “post-maternal” as a parental model. To promote “the pluralisation and hybridisation of contemporary motherhood(s),” Weibel foregrounds the deconstruction of gender essentialism initiated by American poet Adrienne Rich in Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976), retracing its resonances and possible dialogues with psychoanalytic theory. As she calls for a broader rethinking of mothering as “pluriversal maternities,” Weibel further reinstantiates plurality as a crucial conceptual tool to reconfigure the universal in the present era.

8The next three articles of the collection consider how the ecological crisis calls for a reassessment of the universal, emphasizing how closely the Anthropocene is associated with the idea of the universal. Marina Pingler considers various understandings of the Anthropocene in light of a science-fiction novel and a political manifesto, in order to tease out the tensions underlying universalist conceptions of the human. While the natural sciences define the Anthropocene as a geological epoch marked by the profound effect of human activity on the planet, scholars in the humanities and social sciences foreground the social, racial, and economic factors behind who is actually responsible for or victim of environmental damage. Pingler’s approach involves both “emphasizing ecological posthumanism’s anthropos,” whereby the human is conceived in its “entangled” relationship with the environment, while also “stressing socio-political differentiation” regarding who causes and suffers most acutely from ecological degradation. Building on critical posthumanism and new materialism, Loredana Filip examines some of the blind spots and universalist biases of both the Anthropocene and posthumanism through the study of science-fiction narratives by Octavia Butler and Ursula Le Guin. This critical move allows for “a reflection on the power and relevance of literature in a post-anthropocentric world that no longer privileges the human.” Not only do these science-fiction works expose what Filip styles “dangerous altruism,” they also prompt us to reassess ontological categories by offering new ways of crossing the line between the human and the nonhuman. In “The Universal and the Environmental Crisis: In Search of New Narrative Modes” Christine Lorre posits that “the crisis of the universal is (also) a narrative crisis” and explores the relations between art and activism in relation to the dual crisis of the universal and the environment. Exploring works by New Zealand scientist and life writer Rebecca Priestly (Fifteen Million Years in Antarctica), Uganda activist Vanessa Nakate (A Bigger Picture) and Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, she studies how their artistic and activist positions use different narrative strategies to shift established perspectives. Drawing from Souleymane Bachir Diagne’s fundamental work which seeks to open the concept of the universal to decentered and multiple voices, the article invites us to follow the cue of the three artists under discussion as we look for ways to respond to the ecological crisis. In order to achieve planetary consciousness, these artists insist on the need for both a universal memory based on testimony, as well as a change in the way we approach the question of scale.

9The last three contributions to this special issue question and complicate the distinction between the singular and the universal as well as between individual identity and collective experience. Delving into the crises of the universal does not necessarily mean that we should categorically reject it or view it as a conceptual fallacy. In her essay on Louise Glück’s poetry, Marie Olivier investigates how alternative forms of the universal might be reclaimed. Paying particular attention to form and syntax, she explores the porous line between the first person and the collective, and contends that the poet’s writing “achieves universality while maintaining affect and emotion through a poetics of experience.” The lyrical self opens itself to the universal, freeing itself from narcissism and allowing for a suspension of agency that gestures towards ataraxia. Rather than constraining or erasing it, this process enables the self to merge harmoniously into the universal. Exploring the relationship between the singular and the collective in Zora Neale Hurston’s work, Carline Encarnacion unpacks the paradoxes of Hurston’s anti-universalist positions, arguing for their intimate connection to her intellectual position as an anthropologist, to her passion for folklore, localism and lived experience. It is her work as a writer, her ability to capture voice and cadences that give aesthetic depth to her position. As Encarnacion explains: “Hurston was deeply convinced that folklore was an ongoing movement, a living vibration that needed to be passed on by any means necessary.” Offering new avenues for investigating the tension between the singular and the collective is also central to Kerry-Jane Wallart’s reading of two contemporary female poets from the Black Atlantic. She pays attention to how M. NourbeSe Philip and Natasha Trethewey both “endeavour to probe the exclusions and inclusions of the enslaved, who have been placed outside a universal community by historical agendas and are brought back in the fold of agency through personal narrations.” The poets’ experimentation with form—whether through lyricism or syntactic fragmentation—takes a political turn and is instrumental in this process of historical inclusion, which simultaneously involves a dissemination of the “I” while giving voice to silenced individual experiences. Such resistance to “hegemonic historiography” exemplifies the overall ambition of this issue. To help continue to learn from the crises of the universal in Anglophone cultures, literatures and criticism, our collective reflection hopes to retrieve a politics of the universal from fragments and fractures. Out of this productive unfinishedness arises the necessity for renewed reflections on the ways in which the concept of the universal engages all of us.

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References

Electronic reference

Caroline Pollentier, Antonia Rigaud, Ronan Ludot-Vlasak and John DeWitt, “Introduction”Miranda [Online], 32 | 2025, Online since 13 October 2025, connection on 17 January 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/67198; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/14yo8

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