Given that the orientation of many novels from so-called ‘post’ colonial nations is increasingly towards a critique of globalization rather than the former imperial metropolis, a reconstitution of the fi eld of postcolonial literary studies seems ever more urgent. One possible reorientation would be to develop a globalized postcolonial comparativism that critically engages the aesthetics of literatures of capitalist peripheries, in order to theorize the uneven relations of global capitalism and new and ongoing forms of military and economic imperialism. As such, Franco Moretti has provided a useful starting point in his conceptualization of “world literature” as neither a canon of masterworks, nor merely as a mode of reading, but rather as literature of the capitalist world-system:

I will borrow . . . [my] initial hypothesis from the world-system school of economic history, for which international capitalism is a system that is simultaneously one, and unequal; with a core, and a periphery (and a semiperiphery) that are bound together in a relationship of growing inequality. One, and unequal: one literature (Weltliteratur, singular, as in Goethe and Marx), or, perhaps better, one world literary system (of inter-related literatures); but a system which is different from what Goethe and Marx had hoped for, because it’s profoundly unequal. (Moretti 2000: par 6)

In particular, Moretti’s emphasis on “one, and unequal” system calls for a new consideration of the aesthetics of world literatures in light of the Marxist theory of combined and uneven development.