In the eighteenth century, many writers and thinkers believed firmly, although not without contestation, in the utopian potential of trade as a means of transcultural exchange and dialogue between vastly different communities across the globe. This consideration of global cooperation most often assumed, at the centre of its operations, a distinctly human agent (an individual or a company) in charge of directing the global flows of trade that would, hopefully, lead towards a better world. Yet the eighteenth century was also an era that displayed, at least in European societies of the Global North, a distinct fascination with objects, particularly those from distant lands. Traded as commodities, exchanged as exotic gifts or studied as scientific items and museum pieces, these objects became dis-placed and re-placed things, facilitating the narrativisation of both European and non-European cultures, accruing shifting meanings and recordings of their value as they moved across geographical and temporal zones. 

In this paper, I will look at two instances of the mobility of objects in literature, specifically the peculiar eighteenth-century vogue for the genre of literature known as ‘it-narratives’. Scholars have shown that the it-narrative needs to be seen in the context of commodity fetishism and the objectification of the human subject. However, my examination of these narratives foregrounds the various geographical and cross-cultural journeys undertaken by the object-narrator-protagonists as a mapping of global and worldly space-time. I read the it-narratives as forms of ‘material fictions’ in which the temporal mobilities of objects mediate between differences. My analysis utilizes Brian Massumi’s concept of ‘enactive cartography’ (2002, 2014), as well as Catherine Malabou’s notion of ‘plasticity’ (2008, 2010), which are remodelling relations within spacetime and the relations between things (human/nonhuman) that make up the world. Both Massumi and Malabou articulate notions of space and time that are contingent, local, embedded and provisional, and provide a theoretical framework to enable the movements of objects as creating culturally-specific locations of meaning in spacetime. I ask to what extend the affects created by the ‘material fictions’ can be seen as mobilising the possible by experimenting with conventional literary forms. The affective cartography created by the material excess of the objects contests binaries such as human/nonhuman and material/imaginary, pointing to a wider world that escapes our mapping and meaning-making efforts. As such, this process reconfigures spacetime as multi-layered, in which temporalities of the human and the nonhuman overlap and become entangled.