INTRODUCTION
25
but they are transformed into formal strategies (puns, syntactical ambiguities, plotlessness) in Banjo (1929), the novel that he was revising while in Morocco. In fiction, McKay explored playfulness and elusiveness as the survival tactics of migrants without papers or paths to citizenship. To claim the identity of an internationalist—because it was comical, but also because it was inscrutable—illustrates a chimerical kind of unknowability; it interferes with and repurposes categorical language to push against external attempts at classification. McKay’s internationalism is of an entirely different order from the proposed plans and institutional forms of Wilsonian internationalism that E. H. Carr called utopian. Indeed, his experiences and his transformation of those experiences into art offer a certain kind of historical truth about the dark side of liberal internationalism, lost to the once “infant” and now grown science of international politics. In showing how McKay and other writers contribute to the analysis of international conditions, I am making a case for literature’s contribution to the intellectual history of globalization. Intellectual history, as I invoke it here, refers less to a subdiscipline of history, itself rife with self-definitional and methodological debates, than to a multidisciplinary humanistic project of understanding— in Stefan Collini’s words, “those ideas, thoughts, arguments, beliefs, assumptions, attitudes, and preoccupations that together made up the intellectual or reflective life of previous societies.” 49 Such a project is necessarily interdisciplinary in scope, but, Collini continues, it benefits from a variety of what may be seen as discipline-specific skills: “the trained sensibilities of the literary critic, alert to all forms of affective and non-literal writing, or the analytical skills of the philosopher, probing the reasoning that ostensibly connects premises and conclusions.” In attributing to literary works the capability of, if not exactly arguments, their own forms of analytical intervention into global thought, I am hybridizing the “trained sensibilities” of the literary critic with the “analytical skills” of the philosopher. I suspect few literary critics would object to this approach, but those outside the field of literary studies may find it more surprising. Reading literature not just for the lived experience of those who came before us or exist alongside us (albeit in very different ways) but also for the ways in which literary works stage the interaction of ideas with feelings, action, and embodiment in fact addresses one of the old but recurring criticisms of intellectual history: that it is too willing to grant autonomy to ideas (as opposed to human actors or systems) as the