Francescomaria Tedesco Te Teory Tat Lives On — A Counterintuitive History An Interview with Timothy Brennan For twenty-fve years, Timothy Brennan has been a prominent Amer- ican literary and cultural critic writing in both scholarly and broadly public venues. Part of the frst generation of postcolonial theorists who studied in the 1980s at Columbia University under Edward Said and the author of one of the feld’s foundational texts (“Te National Longing for Form,” in Homi K. Bhabha’s edited collection Nation and Narration, Routledge, 1990), he introduced the work of Salman Rushdie to the profession with his frst book, Salman Rush- die and the Tird World: Myths of the Nation (Macmillan, 1989). Tis was the frst biographical and critical study of the author’s work in any language and a book that appeared before Rushdie became a cause célèbre. Brennan was an early theorist of what has since come to be known as world literature, which he explored at length in At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (Harvard University Press, 1997). In this book, he helped launched the now fourishing debate over “cos- mopolitics” in literary circles, charting the ways in which an emergent world literature refects the values of the imperial center and creates an attraction for otherness that resembles the literary modernism of the American book markets. His writing has always been centrally about the colonial imagination and imperial culture — especially the traces of imperial culture in metropolitan intellectual practices. Focusing on the political and racial margins, he edited for many years a book series at Cambridge University Press titled “Cultural Margins.” Within the feld of postcolonial theory, he has urged that we need to return to the literary vulgate, to the still untapped novelties of realism, and to the philological emphases of Mikhail Bakhtin and the traditions of critical theory based on the Italian humanist Giambattista Vico. His case for this move was in part laid out in Wars of Position: Te Cultural Politics of Left and Right (Columbia University Press, 2006), which stressed the need to think of political belief cultures as belonging under the category of “identity” and to recognize that the state is not an obsolete form under globalization but still one of the most mean- minnesota review 78 (2012) DOI 10.1215/0026 5667-1550644 © 2012 Virginia Tech 62