Economic and cultural globalization threatens the nation-state's ability to control institutions like the university, where a general emphasis on national subjectivities and ideologies is giving way to a focus on diasporic and postnational formations. Globalization challenges our tendency in literary studies to organize programs and curricula along national lines. This is particularly true for English literature, the contemporary production and consumption of which no longer take place within discrete national borders but unfold in a complex system of transnational economic and cultural exchanges. As we reorganize our approach to English in this context, we need to develop a thorough understanding of the key terms, issues, and debates that have marked the rise of globalization studies. Most important, we need to resituate English in a global framework without subjecting postnational literatures to the colonizing effects of some of our traditional hierarchies and practices.

The national model of literary history—with its developmental, teleological narrative of emergence and its vision of ineffable belonging and uniqueness—has lost much of its traditional pedagogical centrality, but it has not vanished. Rather, it has migrated from the center to what was once the periphery, where it now flourishes as a way of affirming the identity claims of hitherto marginalized groups. Literary historians speaking for such groups may openly acknowledge that the terms associated with the old historical narrative—evolutionary, continuous, organic, and the like—are largely fictive, yet these writers self-consciously embrace the fiction in order to appropriate its power. But this embrace entails serious risks: cynicism, enforced performativity, and repetition compulsion. A more powerful alternative lies in the emerging practice of mobility studies.

Let me begin by quickly spelling out what I take to be the intellectual and disciplinary basis of this forum as implied in its title. I'll also say a little about the general assumptions that may have governed or provoked its convening at the MLA convention this immediately premillennial year.

In literary studies, our current use of global is often implicitly or explicitly invested in the notion of an ever-widening network of communications, of unprecedented linkages among previously disconnected or distinct cultural units. Where things were formerly separate and unrelated, they are now believed to be increasingly connected through multiple contacts, in processes that are rendered cosmopolitan, international, and cross-cultural. The underlying assumption in much of the talk about globalization is that of inclusionism—of the possibilities of including, of incorporating things into a kind of coexistence that was once out of the question. If we translate this state of affairs into religious terms, globalization would probably appear in the form of the command “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”

The debate over Rigoberta Menchú's testimonio has centered on whether or not Menchú told the “truth” regarding details of her personal life. According to her critics, her “lies” discredit her testimony and reduce the moral authority of leftist intellectuals who teach testimonial texts. This focus on verifiable facts ignores the literary value of testimonios in general and the importance of Menchú's testimony in particular in a discursive war tied to cold war politics. This essay explores the problematics of truth, the nature of testimonio as a genre, and the relation between political solidarity and subaltern narrative. It also examines the function of Menchú's testimonio as a discourse on ethnicity and considers the relation among the anthropologist, the subaltern subject, and truth. The conclusion deals with the need to rethink the concept of identity, with the desires and fantasies of subjective transformation, and with the notion of identity politics.

This study calls for globalizing recognitions and for writing less exclusionary histories. In introductory remarks, it relates two undermined cultures to current globalization and to “Western civilization” as a complex constructed from selected ancient Greek, Roman, and Judeo-Christian elements. Seven sections illustrate various contradictions in scholarship, in literary history, and in practice and attempt to reinsert Canaanite, Etruscan, and other suppressed civilizations into the Western and monotheistic self-valuation. The sections are titled “Etruscology,” “Recognition Politics and Paradigmatic Omissions,” “A Few Scholars,” “Recognition Textbooks,” “Canaan, Ugarit, and Biblical Scholarship,” “Demonologies,” and “Writing Writing.” The last section suggests that the original development and transmission of the alphabet could be used as another model for human commonality and for altering frameworks of interaction, knowledge, and recognition.

The enormous twenty-seven-nation post-Soviet sphere—including the former Soviet republics and the former “East Bloc” states—is virtually never discussed in the burgeoning discourse of postcolonial studies. Yet Russia and the successor Soviet Union exercised colonial control over the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Baltics, and Central and Eastern Europe for anywhere from fifty to two hundred years. The present essay interrogates the possible postcoloniality of the post-Soviet sphere, including Russia. The investigation is complicated by Russia's seeming Eurasian status and its history of perceived cultural inferiority to the West. A broad range of theoretical, historical, cultural, and geographic positions are examined, and figures such as Curzon, Conrad, Lermontov, and Shohat are addressed. In conclusion the essay argues against the current occidentocentric privileging of Western European colonization as the standard and proposes a fully global postcolonial critique. Overall, it critiques both too narrow post-Soviet studies and too parochial, too Anglo-Franco-focused postcolonial studies.

Global production of literature and criticism about the environment has increased dramatically in the past decade, but black African writers and critics have not participated fully in this new approach. Literary green globalism, broadcast from metropolitan centers East and West, has inspired suspicion among some black African anglophone writers, while gaining acceptance among others, who with their Euro-American counterparts have begun to examine the relations of humanity and nature in sub-Saharan environments.

Discourse on globalization regularly sells itself as the next big thing. If we read before buying it, however, it may seem that the novelty of globalization has been oversold and its enduring features underestimated. Against the tendency to oppose global processes to local practices (e.g., as future to past), the essay argues for seeing literary studies hitorically as a form of “glocalization,” reworking the topics of locality and place while recalling the forms of their dislocation. Recognizing this historical implication in the global should keep us from being stampeded by market-driven scenarios of globalism and allow us to recover ways to configure alternative futures. What is needed are tactical (in Certeau's sense) responses to globalization and a renewed commitment to practices of disciplined skepticism.

“Charter'd Companies may indeed be the form the world has now increasingly begun to take,” announces Charles Mason in Thomas Pynchon's 1997 novel Mason and Dixon. Taking that cryptic comment as a starting point and drawing on Giovanni Arrighi's account of the recurrent organization of capital by metropolitan “spaces-of-flows,” this essay investigates what it might mean for Mason's comment to be true of both his late-eighteenth-century moment and the late-twentieth-century moment of the novel's publication and asks what such a reading of the “form [of] the world” implies for contemporary attempts to rethink literary study under the sign of the global. The essay offers “laws” of such a global form (expansion contracts, contraction enriches, enrichment haunts) and deploys them to read the two modes of globalized literary study that have achieved dominance of late: global literary study as method and as project—the key method in question understood here as a type of global historicism and the key project as the appeal to reconfigure literary study as the study of something called global literature.

What happens when a text is read in different centuries, different countries? The fate of the Divine Comedy in the Soviet Union suggests one answer. Focusing on Osip Mandelstam's intense attachment to Dante and thinking generally about the consequences of a globalizing readership, this essay argues for literature as a peculiar form of “life,” a planetary life. Not biological like an organism and not territorial like a nation, this form of life extends across linguistic borders and across the borders of chronology. This form of life comprises a population of temporal hybrids: “translations” that disrupt the territorial sovereignty of the state, even as they disrupt its regime of simultaneity.

Nuria Amat's view of literature between borders places her in the arduous trajectory of Spanish women writers, who have written their works from the periphery of Spanish fiction. Historically, few women have been among the canonical writers of Spain, and those who wrote were known for their ambivalent representations of their role as authors. Marginal writers of both sexes were forced to engage in literary disguises and subterfuges, “common and necessary practices for those who deviated from orthodoxy and convention” (Levine and Marson xxi). With the death of Franco in 1975, women writers of Spain such as Ana María Moix (b. 1947, Catalonia), Esther Tusquets (b. 1946, Catalonia), Marina Mayoral (b. 1942, Galicia), Lourdes Ortiz (b. 1943), Montserrat Roig (b. 1946, Catalonia), Cristina Fernández Cubas (b. 1945, Barcelona), and Rosa Montero (b. 1951, Madrid) began to explore their personal and national histories as the censorship ended. There soon followed a boom of female writers, who, “encouraged by the feminist movement and by all the changing atmosphere of the seventies, were able to find marketing success that soon made them visible” (Nichols 11).