Literature

Global literature refers to forms or traditions of writing that bear a relationship with one another either because they address issues that are considered explicitly global—such as climate change, human rights, international finance, diasporic communities, worldwide terrorism—or because they represent ways of drawing aspects of verbal experience into networks of transnational interconnectivity and interdependence. Global literature as an area of global studies is therefore to be differentiated both from the field known as comparative literature and from “world writing.” It is neither, as in the first instance, a disciplinary enterprise devoted to comparing and contrasting representative texts from the world's major literary traditions, mostly national, in order to come up with a generalized sense of their chief characteristics, nor is it committed, as in the second instance, to developing a more generalized, if not unified, model of writing itself.

Global literature is rather a disciplinary construct and mode of reading that permits one to study the relations that particular kinds of literary production, [Page 1085]consumption, and circulation possess with one another when they are seen within what might be called a global frame. A global frame is defined less by the contents that make it up than by the horizons within which it seeks to situate its subjects, horizons which reveal some of ways that the world can be experienced as an interlinked, even interactive, system of meaning and interpretation.

This does not discount the fact that distinctive literary spaces have developed over decades, and sometimes centuries, within certain regions of the world, often organized around great metropolitan centers—Athens, Rome, Beijing, Baghdad, Cairo, Tokyo—where literary practice has encouraged provinces, parties, regions, even states, to create a cultural marketplace in which, at a minimum, literary and aesthetic values could compete with one another and in which, at a maximum, such struggles could yield an art whose aspirations were not merely translocal but, within their own realm of association and ambition, potentially universal. If the first site where such a literary project was actually produced in the modern period is to be identified with Paris in the 18th century, it was eventually to be followed in the 19th century by London and in the 20th century by New York. Always products of conflict and contestation, such literature, from the 18th century to the present, inevitably has been compelled to resist the pull of nationalism and its allied ideological formation known as colonialism, but whether they have succeeded in yielding a genuinely transnational or postcolonial world of letters in the later 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century remains an open question.