The Bio- and Geopolitics of Rooms

Abstract

In analyses of the relationship between literature and geopolitics I have turned on more than one occasion to a chapter in Franco Moretti’s Atlas of the European Novel where he contrasts the literary geographies in Jane Austen’s sentimental (“Silver Fork”) novels with Sir Walter Scott’s historical novels. Moretti points out that Austen, whose novels focus on a class-based marriage market, confines her geography to “a small homogenous England” (Moretti, 1998, p. 14). Her novels’ ideological perspective on space are unconcerned with the process of nation-building, while in contrast Scott, whose novels are mainly concerned with nation-building, constructs a much larger UK, one involved in a process of expansion, “the incorporation of the internal periphery into the larger unit of the state” (p. 40). The presumed methodological implication of Moretti’s contrast is that novelistic and other textual contributions to knowledge of geopolitics is afforded through expansive perspectives on space. The political geographer Peter Taylor challenges that implication in his analysis of “World Cities.” His investigation, which emphases the flows that shape much of global political economy, articulates a reduced rather than enlarged geographical perspective. In an inquiry that relies on what he refers to as “office geography data” (Taylor, 200, p. 5), Taylor’s spatial focus is on rooms. Moving on from analyses that shifted the “metageography” from the “mosaic of states” to the “networks of cities” (p. 11). In earlier inquiries, Taylor down-shifts to a still smaller space and analyzes the work in offices that contain some of the main protagonists in global political economy. In an analysis of “the global reach” of “networks of offices” operating in “world cities” (p. 11) his focus is on rooms filled with people involved in finance, accountancy, and legal services.
If we imagine a distant future in which the files (both material and electronic) from those offices are recovered, the yield would be a mapping of the loci of control over twentieth and twenty-first century global commerce. To elaborate on that reflection, I want to turn back to a distant past and evoke a similar recovery of a mapping of global commerce, which also relied on room data, collected in a room in an ancient “world city.” A “social and economic history” dating from “the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries,” linked to middle level merchant classes, was available in a storage room adjoining a synagogue in Cairo (Goitein, 1960, p. 91). The ethnographic historian S. D Goitein recovered aspects of that history from letters and other papers – “discarded writings” – in the “Geniza” (storage room) of a Cairo synagogue. The documents constitute “the opposite of an archive”; they are “thrown away there only after they have lost all value to their possessors [and]…in most cases, only a long time after they had been written” (p. 92).
Decades after Goitein interpreted the Geniza documents to recover aspects of a social and economic history, the novelist Amitav Ghosh perused some of the same documents to write a semi-fictional story of twelfth-century relationships among a Tunisian Jewish trader, Ben Yiju (mentioned in Goitein’s history), his Indian slave, Bomma, and their “merchant friends.” Following the protagonists on “an itinerary that links the Levant, or the eastern Mediterranean with the western shores of India (Shammas, 1993),” Ghosh’s novel recovers an ancient trading route in a story that begins with reference to Bomma’s “debut” in a 1942 article in Hebrew journal, based on a letter once stored in the Geniza. The novel picks up his story later with Bomma’s second appearance in another Geniza letter “translated and edited by Professor S.D. Goitein” (Ghosh, 1992, p 17). Like Goitein, Ghosh’s focus is on economic traders with humble backgrounds who left what he refers to as “those barely discernible traces that ordinary people leave upon the world” (p. 19).
The discarded letters in the Cairo Geniza provided Ghosh with the resources to write a cultural history in the form of a travelogue that follows his protagonists’ medieval socio-economic itinerary. It’s a semi-fictional story that offers a view of exemplary mundane lives involved in ancient trading practices. Heeding the methodological implications of a room-oriented metageography, in the following section I shift to the experiences of more economically privileged characters in a home whose most significant feature is a room in a modernist glass and steel house whose design and changing uses are connected with global historical trajectories.