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En los análisis de la relación entre literatura y geopolítica he recurrido en más de una ocasión a un capítulo del Atlas de la novela europea de Franco Moretti en el que contrasta las geografías literarias de las novelas sentimentales ("Silver Fork") de Jane Austen con las novelas históricas de Sir Walter Scott. Moretti señala que Austen, cuyas novelas se centran en un mercado matrimonial clasista, limita su geografía a "una pequeña Inglaterra homogénea" (Moretti, 1998, p. 14). La perspectiva ideológica de sus novelas sobre el espacio se despreocupa del proceso de construcción de la nación, mientras que, por el contrario, Scott, cuyas novelas se ocupan principalmente de la construcción de la nación, construye un Reino Unido mucho más amplio, que está involucrado en un proceso de expansión, "la incorporación de la periferia interna a la unidad mayor del Estado" (p. 40). La presunta implicación metodológica del contraste de Moretti es que las contribuciones novelísticas y de otros textos al conocimiento de la geopolítica se dan a través de perspectivas expansivas del espacio. El geógrafo político Peter Taylor desafía esa implicación en su análisis de "World Cities". Su investigación, que hace hincapié en los flujos que conforman gran parte de la economía política mundial, articula una perspectiva geográfica reducida en lugar de ampliada. En una investigación que se basa en lo que él denomina "datos de geografía de oficinas" (Taylor, 200, p. 5), el enfoque espacial de Taylor se centra en las habitaciones. Pasando de los análisis que desplazaban la "metageografía" del "mosaico de estados" a las "redes de ciudades" (p. 11). En investigaciones anteriores, Taylor baja a un espacio aún más pequeño y analiza el trabajo en las oficinas que albergan a algunos de los principales protagonistas de la economía política global. En un análisis del "alcance global" de las "redes de oficinas" que operan en las "ciudades del mundo" (p. 11), su atención se centra en las salas llenas de personas relacionadas con las finanzas, la contabilidad y los servicios jurídicos.
Si imaginamos un futuro lejano en el que se recuperen los archivos (tanto materiales como electrónicos) de esas oficinas, el resultado sería una cartografía de los lugares de control del comercio mundial de los siglos XX y XXI. Para profundizar en esta reflexión, quiero volver a un pasado lejano y evocar una recuperación similar de una cartografía del comercio mundial, que también se basaba en los datos de las habitaciones, recogidos en una habitación de una antigua "ciudad mundial". Una "historia social y económica" que data de "los siglos XI al XIII", vinculada a las clases mercantiles de nivel medio, estaba disponible en un almacén contiguo a una sinagoga de El Cairo (Goitein, 1960, p. 91). El historiador etnográfico S. D Goitein recuperó aspectos de esa historia a partir de cartas y otros papeles - "escritos desechados"- en la "Geniza" (almacén) de una sinagoga de El Cairo. Los documentos constituyen "lo contrario de un archivo"; "se tiran allí sólo cuando han perdido todo valor para sus poseedores [y]... en la mayoría de los casos, sólo mucho tiempo después de haber sido escritos" (p. 92).
Décadas después de que Goitein interpretara los documentos de la Geniza para recuperar aspectos de una historia social y económica, el novelista Amitav Ghosh examinó detenidamente algunos de los mismos documentos para escribir una historia semi-ficticia sobre las relaciones en el siglo XII entre un comerciante judío tunecino, Ben Yiju (mencionado en la historia de Goitein), su esclava india, Bomma, y sus "amigos comerciantes". Siguiendo a los protagonistas en "un itinerario que une el Levante, o el Mediterráneo oriental, con las costas occidentales de la India (Shammas, 1993)", la novela de Ghosh recupera una antigua ruta comercial en una historia que comienza con la referencia al "debut" de Bomma en un artículo de 1942 en una revista hebrea, basado en una carta que en su día se guardó en la Geniza. La novela retoma su historia más tarde con la segunda aparición de Bomma en otra carta de Geniza "traducida y editada por el profesor S.D. Goitein" (Ghosh, 1992, p 17). Al igual que Goitein, Ghosh se centra en los comerciantes económicos de origen humilde que dejaron lo que él denomina "esas huellas apenas perceptibles que la gente corriente deja en el mundo" (p. 19).
Las cartas desechadas en la Geniza de El Cairo proporcionaron a Ghosh los recursos para escribir una historia cultural en forma de diario de viaje que sigue el itinerario socioeconómico medieval de sus protagonistas. Se trata de un relato semificticio que ofrece una visión de las vidas mundanas ejemplares implicadas en las antiguas prácticas comerciales. Atendiendo a las implicaciones metodológicas de una metageografía orientada a las habitaciones, en la siguiente sección me desplazo a las experiencias de personajes más privilegiados económicamente en una vivienda cuyo rasgo más significativo es una habitación de una casa modernista de cristal y acero cuyo diseño y usos cambiantes están conectados con las trayectorias históricas globales.
The initiating focus of “The Bio- and Geopolitics of Rooms” is a comparison of different “metageographies: states, cities and rooms. Focusing on the smallest entities, the essay goes on to an analysis of the geo- and biopolitics of a wide variety of rooms. The analysis begins with a treatment of a geniza, a synagogue storage room in Cairo, whose contents became the basis of both a scholarly and novelistic recovery of a social and economic history. It’s a history that maps an ancient trading route. Inspired by the historical study, the novel version invents characters to animate that history with a semi-fictional story that offers a view of mundane lives involved in ancient trading practices.The diverse readings of rooms presume a temporal rather than structural perspective in which, heeding the insights of the architectural theorist, Bernard Tschumi, buildings are understood as event spaces. With that as a primary conceptual orientation, the analysis moves to the text at the center of the article, a novel focused on supermundane lives. Associated with famous architectural event, the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s. design of a home (in the 1920s) for a wealthy Jewish family in Brno, Czechoslovakia, the novel, Simon Mawer’s The Glass Room, turns the home’s featured room into a protagonist that ultimately hosts a variety of occupants. After an extended analysis of the Mawer novel, in which the room’s history includes its use as a biogenetic laboratory by invading Nazis (a theme picked up later in the essay’s textual montage), the article turns to an analysis of private rooms, beginning with a treatment of the sitting room in the home of Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk’s grandmother, for whom the room was a museum curated to represent her Kemalist/western allegiance. That treatment of a private space is followed by a description of the semiotics of rooms belonging to Russian emigres whose rooms express the complicated bi-national identities.Following a focus on those rooms is a turn to a novel by the Peruvian Jose Maria Arguedas whose writing in Spanish but with the syntax of Peru’s indigenous Quechuan language was a result of his childhood confinement to a kitchen among indigenous servants. The novel is a compositional critique of Creole dominance. Like Pamuk’s grandmother’s sitting room, the kitchen in which Arguedas dwelled as a child distilled a larger world down to a room with hard boundaries, in his case a world of colonial dominance registered in a spatio-temporal history through which much of the indigenous Andean population of Peru had been reduced to servitude. As the analysis shifts to public rooms, the focus is on courtrooms in which the trials involve war crimes prosecutions. The first one is featured in Mathias Enard’s novel Zone, which begins with his protagonist, a reformed Croatian militiaman is reporting on his witnessing of the trial of his former commander. The report describes what the protagonist calls a “a multilingual circus of the ICJ,” involving multiple participants, among which are jurors, knowledge agents from diverse academic disciplines, and media people, all contributing to the interpretations that constitute the will-have-been of the crimes perpetrated by the defendant, who stands in for the crimes of many. The focus then continues on courtrooms, the next of which is featured in Michel Foucault’s analysis of “criminal danger,” in which, analyzing a moment of interrogation that takes place in a nineteenth century French courtroom, he refers to the historical emergence of “the criminal” as an object of juridical attention (whereas prior to the mid nineteenth century, the focus was on crimes and penalties).That textual analysis is followed by a reading of a novel that features an unnamed protagonist in Katie Kitamura’s appropriately entitled novel Intimacies, who serves as a translator at the trail of a former African president who has been brought to The Hague after being charged with war crimes. The novel’s courtroom drama focuses on the struggle by the translator to make the space between languages as small as possible in order to manage the linguistic demands of reliable translation while at the same time managing an uncomfortable intimacy with a man whose crimes she views as abhorrent.That trial room is contrasted with one in Hugo Blick’s eight-part Netflix series Black Earth Rising, which treats those geopolitical forces far more elaborately than they are in Kitamura’s novel. To frame Blick’s courtroom drama, the analysis turns to Shoshana Felman’s distinction between ‘literary justice,” a dimension of concrete embodiment and a language of finitude, which contrasts with legal justice, a framing that is also applied to the amnesty trials ordered by South Africa’s “Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” Gillian Slovo’s novelistic version, in her Red Dust, of one such trial is focused on an interpersonal encounter in the trail room between a torturer and his victim. The article ends with an analysis of Arthur Miller’s play, a one room drama featuring a group of jews and suspected jews rounded up in Vichy France during the Nazi occupation. The drama treats their interactions as they are sitting in a police station waiting their interrogations. The play is described as remarkably Sartrean in the way its scenario mirrors one in Sartre’s story “The Wall,” which begins with a roundup and interrogation of suspected “anarchists” (Popular Front activists associated with the Spanish Civil War): In the charged rooms of his situation dramas Sartre exercises a phenomenology of choice in which his protagonists effectively choose themselves, performing an agency that moves them from the concrete presence with which they enter the drama to a possibility of personhood that extends well beyond the particular situation. They are involved in actions that are as much events of ethical self-discovery and self-making as they are the acceptances of responsibility to alterity. Similarly, Miller’s room is also a space of self-discovery, which he intends to be taken as a general lesson; it’s not “about Nazism,” he says in a reflection about his play, but about “our individual relationship with injustice.” “Incident at Vichy,” he adds, “has been called a play whose theme is ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ Not so, ‘Am I my own keeper?’ is more correct.”
