In 1913, the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore received the Nobel Prize in literature on the basis of Gitanjali, a single volume of poems idiosyncratically self-translated from Bengali into English. “A whole people, a whole civilization, immeasurably strange to us, seems to have been taken up into this imagination,” W.B. Yeats wrote in his introduction.

A British colonial subject, Tagore was an inhabitant of that thing we call the world, which was formed by the violence of empire and capital at the very moment in the early nineteenth century when Goethe popularized the word “Weltliteratur” and demanded that it transcend national boundaries. But the world conceived of by the European mind was in disarray just a year after Tagore’s Nobel win, as European violence returned to Europe and so became the First World War. Tagore, dismayed equally by European imperialism, Japanese nationalism, and an often dogmatic Indian anti-colonialism, became a trenchant critic of modernity in all its violent forms and was safely forgotten by the West that had discovered him.

If that falling-apart world is easily recognizable a century later, so is the Anglophone literary sphere’s capacity to promote, then discard, its exotic others. Since the end of the Cold War, with its competing ideological visions of the world, literary taste in London and New York has moved in easy step with markets and the internal conflicts of a West built on extracted wealth, war-making, consumerism, and endless self-deception.

As Japan peaked in the Western imagination with its boom-and-bust Asian capitalism, Haruki Murakami became a best seller in the United States. When Mexico had been devastated by grotesque femicide in the zones of free trade where U.S. maquiladoras exploited cheap, often female, labor, Roberto Bolaño posthumously received the attention of literary New York. The literature in translation that came roughly fifteen years after the invasions of Iraq began (The Beekeeper, by Dunya Mikhail; The Book of Collateral Damage, by Sinan Antoon; Frankenstein in Baghdad, by Ahmed Saadawi) was, against the intentions of its authors and translators, easily absorbed as liberal window-dressing for the blood and thunder of empire. The same has happened to outstanding books — like The Space Invaders and The Twilight Zone, both by Nona Fernández — that capture the violence against women and dissidents in Pinochet’s Chile after the 1973 coup.

As the destruction of Palestine continues, the toxic nature of Western culture lies exposed to everyone and everything but itself. The universities that teach literature, the publishers that put out books, and the cultural institutions that circulate ideas are silent when it comes to the death of Palestinians. In September, the New York Public Library prohibited its workers from exhibiting books sympathetic to Palestine even as it was celebrating banned books and James Baldwin, the latter a perceptive critic of Zionism and Western imperialism. Before then, Litprom, a German cultural organization focused on literature from the Global South, called off its award ceremony for the Palestinian writer Adania Shibli at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Around the same time, 92nd Street Y canceled the Pulitzer-winning and anti-genocide writer Viet Thanh Ngyuen’s talk and fired programming staff who protested the censorship. Columbia University, which I attended as a graduate student in the late nineties because of the reputation of the Palestinian scholar Edward Said, has carried out a concerted campaign of intimidation and harassment against students, faculty, and staff expressing any solidarity with Palestine, and in this it is accompanied by many institutions of higher learning.

The rush to read about foreign societies, no matter how open in spirit, no matter if taken up with a sense of solidarity, is easily subsumed under such forces. This is not the shortcoming of the individual reader, writer, translator, or editor. The empire marches on, making slight adjustments in posture, its acts carried out in plain view. The best we can say of the books that make it across the swathes of wreckage is that they show us that the spirit of resistance and hope is not yet dead. That is not enough, however, for those who live in the maw of Anglophone culture, no matter how reluctantly. We have to call to account the universities, publishers, institutions, and cultural gatekeepers who profit off this violence and inequality, and we have to examine, each of us, our complicity in such violence.