This groundbreaking study examines how modern Colombian literature—from Gabriel García Márquez to Juan Gabriel Vásquez—reflects one of the world’s most tumultuous entrances into globalization. While these literary icons, one canonical, the other emergent, bookend Colombia’s fall and rise on the world stage, the period between the two was inordinately violent, spanning the Colombian urban novel’s evolution into narco-literature. Marking Colombia’s cultural and literary manifestations as threefold, this book explores García Márquez’s retreat to a rural romanticism that paradoxically made him a global literary icon; the country’s violent end to the twentieth century when its largest economic export was narcotics; and the contemporary period in which a new major author has emerged to create a “literature of national reconstitution.” Harkening back to the Regeneration movement and extending through the early twenty-first century, this book analyzes the cultural implications of Colombia’s relationship to the wider world.

The Deliverance of Others is a compelling reappraisal of the idea that narrative literature can expand readers' empathy. What happens if, amid the voluminous influx of otherness facilitated by globalization, we continue the tradition of valorizing literature for bringing the lives of others to us, admitting them into our world and valuing the difference that they introduce into our lives? In this new historical situation, are we not forced to determine how much otherness is acceptable, as opposed to how much is excessive, disruptive, and disturbing?

The influential literary critic David Palumbo-Liu suggests that we can arrive at a sense of responsibility toward others by reconsidering the discourses of sameness that deliver those unlike ourselves to us. Through virtuoso readings of novels by J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ruth Ozeki, he shows how notions that would seem to offer some basis for commensurability between ourselves and others—ideas of rationality, the family, the body, and affect—become less stable as they try to accommodate more radical types of otherness. For Palumbo-Liu, the reading of literature is an ethical act, a way of thinking through our relations to others.

Notwithstanding its now extensive, trans-disciplinary bibliography, the full reality of globalization remains less well understood than commonly thought. As an objective, secular phenomenon, globalization has continued to be obscured by ideological and rhetorical strategies that travel under the same name but posit it as simply the abstract-universal other of the local. Dislocalism: The Crisis of Globalization and the Remobilizing of Americanism makes such strategies and the global/local binary they reinforce into objects of critical analysis.

Since 1988, J. Hillis Miller has traveled to China to lecture on literary theory, especially the role of globalization in literary theory. Over time, he has assisted in the development of distinctively Chinese forms of literary theory, Comparative Literature, and World Literature. The fifteen lectures gathered in An Innocent Abroad span both time and geographic location, reflecting his work at universities across China for more than twenty-five years. More important, they reflect the evolution of Miller’s thinking and of the lectures’ contexts in China as these have markedly changed over the years, especially on either side of Tiananmen Square and in light of China’s economic growth and technological change. A foreword by the leading theorist Fredric Jameson provides additional context.

Winner of the 2015 A-Asia/ICAS Africa-Asia Book Prize, a global competition, for the best book in English, French, or Portuguese on any topic linking Asia and Africa.

The Magellan Fallacy argues that literature in Spanish from Asia and Africa, though virtually unknown, reimagines the supposed centers and peripheries of the modern world in fundamental ways. Through archival research and comparative readings, The Magellan Fallacy rethinks mainstream mappings of diverse cultures while advocating the creation of a new field of scholarship: global literature in Spanish. As the first attempt to analyze Asian and African literature in Spanish together, and doing so while ranging over all continents, The Magellan Fallacy crosses geopolitical and cultural borders without end. The implications of the book, therefore, extend far beyond the lands formerly ruled by the Spanish empire. The Magellan Fallacy shows that all theories of globalization, including those focused on the Americas and Europe, must be able to account for the varied significances of hispanophone Asia and Africa as well.

With global debt, labor, and environmental crises on the rise, the precarious position of people in the Global South has become a significant force moving people across countries, continents, and around the world. Through a comparative study of contemporary trans-Atlantic immigrant narratives in French, Spanish, and English, Alexandra Perisic offers an account of a multilingual Atlantic under neoliberalism. More specifically, Precarious Crossings: Immigration, Neoliberalism, and the Atlantic examines how contemporary authors from the Caribbean, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America—including Roberto Bolaño, Giannina Braschi, Maryse Condé, Fatou Diome, Marie Ndiaye, and Caryl Phillips, among others—have reconceptualized the Atlantic from a triangular space into a multipolar one, introducing new destinations for contemporary immigrants and establishing new Atlantic connections.
 
Perisic argues that in traveling beyond the postcolonial route that connects former colonizer and former colonized, these authors also shift their focus from cultural difference and national belonging to precarity—a condition characterized by a lack of economic and social stability and protection—as a shared characteristic under global neoliberalization. She demonstrates how contemporary Atlantic narratives reveal the contradictions inherent in neoliberalism as an ideology—thereby showing how they further participate in Atlantic literary and cultural dialogues and push against literary conventions of various genre as they explore the complexities of a globalized Atlantic.
 

In his new book, Christian Moraru argues that post-Cold War culture in general and, in particular, the literature, philosophy, and theory produced since 9/11 foreground an emergent “planetary” imaginary—a “planetarism”—binding in unprecedented ways the world’s peoples, traditions, and aesthetic practices. This imaginary, Moraru further contends, speaks to a world condition (“planetarity”) increasingly exhibited by human expression worldwide. Grappling with the symptoms of planetarity in the arts and the human sciences, the author insists, is a major challenge for today’s scholars—a challenge Reading for the Planet means to address. Thus, Moraru takes decisive steps toward a critical methodology—a “geomethodology”—for dealing with planetarism’s aesthetic and philosophical projections. Here, Moraru analyzes novels by Joseph O’Neill, Mircea Cartarescu, Sorj Chalandon, Zadie Smith, Orhan Pamuk, and Dai Sijie, among others, as demonstration of his paradigm.

Poetry is often viewed as culturally homogeneous—“stubbornly national,” in T. S. Eliot’s phrase, or “the most provincial of the arts,” according to W. H. Auden. But in A Transnational Poetics, Jahan Ramazani uncovers the ocean-straddling energies of the poetic imagination—in modernism and the Harlem Renaissance; in post–World War II North America and the North Atlantic; and in ethnic American, postcolonial, and black British writing. Cross-cultural exchange and influence are, he argues, among the chief engines of poetic development in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Reexamining the work of a wide array of poets, from Eliot, Yeats, and Langston Hughes to Elizabeth Bishop, Lorna Goodison, and Agha Shahid Ali, Ramazani reveals the many ways in which modern and contemporary poetry in English overflows national borders and exceeds the scope of national literary paradigms. Through a variety of transnational templates—globalization, migration, travel, genre, influence, modernity, decolonization, and diaspora—he discovers poetic connection and dialogue across nations and even hemispheres.

In What Is a World? Pheng Cheah, a leading theorist of cosmopolitanism, offers the first critical consideration of world literature’s cosmopolitan vocation.  Addressing the failure of recent theories of world literature to inquire about the meaning of world, Cheah articulates a normative theory of literature’s world-making power by creatively synthesizing four philosophical accounts of the world as a temporal process: idealism, Marxist materialism, phenomenology, and deconstruction. Literature opens worlds, he provocatively suggests, because it is a force of receptivity. Cheah compellingly argues for postcolonial literature’s exemplarity as world literature through readings of narrative fiction by Michelle Cliff, Amitav Ghosh, Nuruddin Farah, Ninotchka Rosca, and Timothy Mo that show how these texts open up new possibilities for remaking the world by negotiating with the inhuman force that gives time and deploying alternative temporalities to resist capitalist globalization.