World Literature: Against Isolationist Readings

ABSTRACT

The global Coronavirus pandemic is just the latest trigger to ask us to reconsider the futures of terms such as globalization, transnational, and post-national. Conversations about the world and world literature can hardly be dis-embedded from the larger historical-political text of the world, or multi-perspectival, prismatic examinations of the many conflicting worlds that exist. In fact, as is well known, conversations and statements on the connectedness of the world and shared aesthetic affinities have always come at the heels of national or territorial isolationalism, material exceptionalism, and intellectual seclusion.