I hear almacantars singing

I'm willing to admit that the problem is entirely mine. I am, after all, still suffering from the after-effects of grading all those piles of final exams and student papers, so my brain cells might not be quite ready to decipher heavy-duty academic writing. And besides, who wants to think deeply on the first day of summer break?

Nevertheless I plunge eagerly into the first chapter of The Long Space: Transnationalism and Postcolonial Form by Peter Hitchcock, and while I detect the presence of important ideas, I can't quite wrap my brain around them.

My problem starts on page 2: "I locate the long space in the extended novel of postcoloniality beside itself. A relatively narrow approach--and one that often relies on theoretically inspired close reading--it will, however, substantiate some broad materialist claims." So far so good. I could quibble about the ambiguity of that phrase "theoretically inspired," which could suggest "inspired by theory" or "inspired, at least theoretically," but otherwise I'm okay with this.

My okayness gets a little shaky with the next sentence: "If they are not a horizon of the literary and the social, or culture and society, these claims yet form an almacantar by which their current constellation may be judged."

I never would have suspected that broad materialist claims could be a horizon of anything, but I appreciate interesting metaphors so I'm willing to go along for the ride. Claims are not horizons. Fine. But what the heck is an almacantar? My first response is to feel stupid, and my second response is to assume that "cantar" has something to do with singing, and my third response is to go to dictionary.com, which informs me that an almacantar is an astronomical term referring to "any circle of the celestial sphere parallel to the horizon; when two objects are on the same almucantar, they have the same altitude."

No, I don't know why it's spelled "almacantar" in the heading and "almucantar" in the definition, but never mind that: what does it mean to say that these broad materialist claims are not a horizon but nevertheless share the same altitude on a circle parallel to the horizon? And not just any almacantar but an almacantar "by which their current constellation may be judged"?

Excuse me, but: what?

How, exactly, does one employ an almacantar in judging a constellation?

I give up and move on:

"The polemic is occasioned primarily by the event of reading inspiring fiction"--not by reading inspiring fiction, you'll note, but by "the event of reading inspiring fiction," and if you can figure out the difference between the two, please let me know. And who is doing the reading here? Or who is experiencing "the event of reading" that occasions the polemic?

"The polemic is occasioned primarily by the event of reading inspiring fiction, but also by the manner in which they speak to several key issues of cultural debate:"--and we'll get to those issues in a minute, but first: who or what are "they"? To find a plural antecedent, I have to backtrack to the previous sentence and latch onto those claims that are not horizons but form an almacantar by which constellations can be judged, and now those same claims are being asked to speak to key issues. I hope those claims are getting a little something extra in their pay packet after all that work.

But they're not done yet--not by a long shot. Take a deep breath:

"The polemic is occasioned primarily by the event of reading inspiring fiction, but also by the manner in which they speak to several key issues of cultural debate: world literature and how it may be determined; the links and breaks between the terms postcolonialism, transnationalism, and globalism; the noncoincidence between literary institutions and the literary; the meaning of form for postcolonialism; the at-once vexed relationship of the novel to nation formation in postcolonial states; postcolonialism as other than the luxury of Western or Westernized cultural elites; critical transnationalism as an interruption of the logic of information retrieval in global circuits of knowledge and power; and the event of colonialism as not historically settled."

Vexed? Unsettled? Interrupted? Sounds like my reading process here. "This is not just a list but an itinerary," continues Hitchcock. He said a mouthful.

But wait, there's more:

"This is not just a list but an itinerary, and one that cannot rest easy with the mantra that culture is the preeminent form of politics in our time and that when we feel global we participate ineluctably in wresting freedom from the crushing realm of necessity."

Wait, so when we feel global we're not actually wresting freedom? I'll make that my new uneasy mantra.

"One cannot negotiate these challenges as if yet another Western critic, by checking off a list, is freed from the privileges of power that produce that subject position. The measure of the itinerary is the polemic it fosters that will deploy the long space as the organizing trope for disputation among them."

"Them" who? "Challenges"? How do challenges dispute?

So the list is an itinerary measured by the polemic it fosters that deploys space as a trope for disputation?

Frankly, I'm simply not equipped to judge this current constellation.