Literary history in South Asia can be neither simply national nor monolingual. Its multilingualism has implications for doing world literature from a South Asian perspective, which does not follow a neat process of distillation from local to regional to national to world. Rather, it requires us to consider multiple co-existing languages (“multilingual locals”) and multiple levels and circuits of circulation that change over time in response to political, ideological, and aesthetic shifts. Paying attention to the media through which literature has circulated into and out of Indian languages, English included, and across regions and countries (“significant geographies”) is also important. We then are able to consider the relative visibility and familiarity of Indian and world literature, “thick” and “thin” readerly encounters, and the local production of world literature in new and interesting ways.

The emergence of world literary studies and the digital turn in literary studies share a seminal text in Franco Moretti’s “Conjectures on World Literature.” Since that article was published in 2000, the ongoing digitization of cultural collections and emergence of new computational methods of analysis have only increased the excitement of some, and concern of others, that digital research will become a major, even a dominant, trajectory in world literary studies. But the associated claim – by critics and proponents alike – that digital approaches represent a paradigmatic shift ignores major continuities between digital research and the non-digital scholarship that preceded and continues alongside it, including in world literary studies. Much of the traction that Moretti’s “distant reading” has gained can be ascribed to commonalities in the conceptions of archives, and foregrounding of networks and patterns, in non-digital scholarship. And Moretti’s claim that “distant reading” dismantles traditional, specifically national and canonical, frameworks is not true of most digital literary projects, including the majority of Moretti’s own experiments. Such continuities, and the resulting disjunction between enactments of digital research and the global and democratic rhetoric in which new technologies are often couched, arise from the substantial ways in which pre-digital traditions, ideologies, and infrastructures shape digital resources and methods. Recognizing and interrogating this inheritance, an emerging group of digital projects advance key aims of world literary studies including situating literature “within a vast transnational library,” expanding “the canon of the literary properly to reflect global diversity,” and offering new conceptual frameworks that “adjust our reading of the novel to world scale” (Smith 92).

A decentralization of power in new play development and production reflects the rebellion and unrest that swept American society in the 1960s and 1970s. US dramaturgy began to reflect a diversity of voices from a wider range of racial and cultural backgrounds, genders, and sexual orientations. Productions resulting from the collaborations discussed in this chapter, such as between August Wilson and Llyod Richards, unearth and confront uncomfortable American histories or grapple with an increasingly diverse fabric of family and society. For playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, content dictated stylistically ambitious form, though productions of her plays directed by Liz Diamond have tended toward a traditional division of labor. Meanwhile, writer/director Maria Irene Fornes aligned stagings of her highly visual feminist plays closely with designers. For playwright Paula Vogel and director Rebecca Taichman, inclusive, unconventional collaborative processes fostered work that engages difficult subjects. The nuances of the collaborative relationships and processes that moved new plays from page to stage in post-1960 America are as varied as the diverse backgrounds of the artists themselves.

The main aim of this chapter is to articulate the relationship between literary catalogs and their creation of readerships, especially when the said relationship is mediated by the state. I propose that the catalogs of national, and by extension world literature become politically and ideology inflected, sometimes through facilitation, other times through obstruction by the state and its ancillaries. I further argue in this chapter that through differentiations of the native and the foreign, the indigenous and the migrant—often propagated through majoritarian myths of national origins—the state functions to privilege certain languages and literatures over others by claims of ownership of certain literary traditions and rejection of others. In addition, the chapter also provide examples of ways in which populist conflations of the indigenous with the original are offered resistance. To this end, the chapter I want to draw attention to three “bibliographic” moments in the changing pact with books of the Indian reading publics: late nineteenth, mid-twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries.

This essay considers modernist internationalism and formal mutation in light of the globalized media ecology brought about by imperialism’s capitalist monopoly of the world-system. Since imperialism and colonialism constituted the first ever properly global system of control and circulation, modernism’s global imaginary and technical innovations cannot be understood outside of a world economic and technological frame. Building on scholarly narratives of modernism’s global vision and its metropolitan incorporation of the colonial periphery/“other,” this article shows how new media technology allowed for the rounding of the world and the advent of new literary forms such as the montage. Media discussed include cinema, photography, magazines, and the phonograph, while poets considered include but are not limited to Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Blaise Cendrars.

This chapter explores the role of consumers in pushing for sustainable business. It finds that although consumers increasingly care about sustainability, there are significant limitations to how able and willing they are to prioritise sustainably-sourced products through their purchasing decisions. Faced with limitations on individual consumer ability and agency to incentivise sustainable business through purchasing decisions, we have seen the mobilisation of consumers by civil society groups focused on tarnishing company reputations; these have been effective in some instances, but are unable to lead to meaningful change at scale.

As of 2019, thirty-five of the past thirty-eight Pulitzer Prize-winning plays premiered in US regional theatres, where many artists maintain lifelong careers. Yet more than half of the nation’s regional theatres regularly borrow funds to meet daily operating expenses. This disconnect between creative success and economic viability is part of a false narrative that has led to systemic problems, leaving many regional theatres vulnerable, and also shaped the historical narrative of the regional movement. This chapter employs an economically centered, historiographical approach to disrupt the standard narrative of the rise of regional theatre, which revolves around a rejection of Broadway’s commercialism and a desire for a decentralized, avant-garde theatre. The reality was much more complex, as demonstrated by case studies of Theatre ’47, the Alley Theatre, and Arena Stage. The Guthrie Theatre serves as a model for a new generation of highly professional, nonprofit theatres that emerged as the movement gained momentum. The chapter concludes with an exploration of the social and cultural forces that inform contemporary theatre economics, and the reminder that budgets reflect values.

World Literature now knows itself as a corpus of peripatetic cultural texts held together by protocols “of circulation and of reading” (Damrosch 4–5), but some accounts of modern literary history in World Literature anthologies impoverish, rather than enrich, students’ understanding of Africa and the worldliness of African cultural texts. To change this, it is necessary to recalibrate the relationship between Africa and World Literature. Rethinking modern literary history, particularly literary modernism, is one way of doing so. Literary modernism was a global, rather than a regional, phenomenon. Globalizing its classics in World Literature anthologies would, therefore, encourage students to read them historically. In practice, this means reading African and Western modernism contrapuntally. Resisting the urge to subsume African cultural texts in pre-established generic categories is another way of doing so. That Son-Jara, Gilgamesh, and The Iliad are epics should not preclude acknowledging that how each produces epicality differs. Admitting that translation cannot overcome all obstacles to mutual intelligibility across languages is an additional way. Some words, some concepts, are simply untranslatable. Such recalibrations open World Literature up to the recognition that Africa and its cultural texts affirmatively intervene in, rather than merely augment, cultural texts of the West.

The goal of this chapter is to elucidate the role and responsibility of the business sector for safeguarding these two rights by clarifying the origins, legal nature, scope and enforcement of obligations placed upon corporate actors. Specifically, the chapter examines whether and how the status of a duty-bearer affects the ambit of the two rights and obligations they give rise to. In other words, what are the differences between the role of businesses and that of states in securing the rights to work and just and favourable conditions of work? While the traditional (positivist) paradigm of human rights protection sees states as ultimately responsible for ensuring that rights are respected by everyone within their respective jurisdictions, certain aspects of the two rights may be fulfilled only by states. In that sense, the scope of duties arising out of the rights to work and just and favourable conditions of work which businesses can in theory be responsible for is materially different.

Rosenthal provides a critical history and analysis of the connections between mainstream and experimental theatre in New York, from the 1960s to 2020, with a focus on Broadway. She argues that Broadway and mainstream theatre underwent multiple and significant transformations during the 1960s and in the decades that followed. Rosenthal analyzes the work of playwrights, directors, composers, choreographers, and designers who made art both downtown in experimental theatres and uptown on Broadway. The concept of the “mainstream experimental” is used as a descriptor for Broadway throughout the following half century, as commercial theatre continued to push and shape US society and culture at large. Alongside artists, pathbreaking producers off and on Broadway are the focus of this chapter, along with the prominence of ensemble-based musicals and dramatic works and the success of solo performances on Broadway. The contributions and legacies of LGBTQ artists such as Tony Kushner, Larry Kramer, and Lisa Kron, and Black artists including August Wilson, George C. Wolfe, Ntozake Shange, Anna Deavere Smith, and Jeremy O. Harris, are central to Rosenthal’s argument and critique.

This essay draws on Pheng Cheah’s insights in What is a World? to examine the contrasting spatiotemporalities of colonial adventure and continental drift in French Indochinese colonial-exotic literature of the 1920s and 1930s. I look first at how the genre worlds in a narrow, linear sense, discursively mapping the spatialized colony in concert with imperialist projections. The focus here is on the ways in which these novels chart the advance of capital through the colony as a spatial category, a distant and subordinate appendage of France, the global center. I then consider Jean d’Esme’s Les Dieux rouges (The Red Gods: A Romance, 1923) as a deviation from the conventions of the genre and the calculated path it lays out. Equal parts colonial-exotic and speculative fiction, Les Dieux rouges tells an alternative geological history of continental drift that undoes the colonizer’s materialist assumptions about the natural world. Through the creation of a parallel, prehistoric world inside the colony but outside the reach of empire, D’Esme’s novel demonstrates a profound dis-ease with the colonial project, an anxiety that, unlike the hesitation that marked many narratives of the period, points to France’s ultimate inability to map Indochina – physically, temporally, or epistemologically – and by extension, the rest of la plus grande France. Les Dieux rouges worlds the colony in the Heideggerian sense by opening up an alternative temporality within it, by imagining, in Cheah’s words, “a force that subtends and exceeds all human calculations that reduce the world as temporal structure to the sum of objects in space” (8). The novel returns the colonizer to the beginning of human time and the human race, not to imply simply that colonialism is a regression, but to challenge the ontological and political realities upon which imperialist assumptions are based.

This chapter examines how a variety of twentieth-century popular forms – circus, Las Vegas spectacles, the modern pop/rock concert, living history museums, and theme parks – created new languages of performance and expanded the realm, scale, and scope of spectacle by borrowing and reshaping past forms and methodologies. These new languages of popular entertainment performance engage most directly with threads of technology, narrative, authenticity, and audience engagement. These threads in turn come to characterize the popular and influence contemporary traditional theatre practice, both nationally and internationally.

This chapter argues that the Mediterranean continues to be a relevant framework of historical and literary analysis even after 1800. By shedding light on two microhistories, one involving the lives of two Ionian poets (Ugo Foscolo and Dionysios Solomos) who became the ‘national poets’ of two different countries (Italy and Greece), and the other a multilingual and multinational text, the Scintille (Sparks, 1841), written by the Veneto-Dalmatian intellectual Niccolò Tommaseo, the chapter offers a reading of nineteenth-century literary history that is regional and maritime rather than national and territorial. The aim is to show how we can re-inscribe intellectuals considered to be the ‘national fathers’ of their respective nations, and works—a part today of different canons of ‘national literature’—into their regional and multicultural context.

World literary studies appears caught between several competing models, each privileging the determining force of a given spatial scale – the global versus the local, national, or regional, - or a specific patterning of space – vertical structure versus horizontal network. This article seeks to test a multiscalar and transregional method of analysis which might place these models in sharper dialogue. It does so by addressing the physiology, a popular quasi-journalistic nineteenth-century genre dedicated to the taxonomic description of mores, customs and social types found in the everyday life of the modern city. Arising in Paris and other metropolises of western Europe, the physiology was soon adapted to the very different circumstances of the Russian capital St. Petersburg, before shifting to the Russian colonial administrative centre of Tiflis (Tbilisi), today the capital of Georgia. This article explores the poetics and cultural politics of the physiology’s adaptation to three distinct urban contexts, in what might be seen as a movement from centre to colonial periphery via the Russian semi-periphery. In doing so it seeks to link genre theory to debates within critical geography on spatial scale, while also entering debates in urban studies and the sociology of culture on metropolitan and peripheral modernization, particularly as it relates to the correlation between the state, the market, and the literary public sphere. Drawing on the work of Henri Lefebvre and Harry Harootunian on the uneven spatio-temporal rhythms of the urban everyday, the article also addresses the limits of such canonical interventions as Walter Benjamin’s critique of the Parisian flâneur and Jürgen Habermas’s account of the bourgeois public sphere.

This chapter critically rethinks world literature models through a discussion of Russian and East Asian (Korea, Japan, and China) literary relations and translation-related issues (including the politics of translation, the circulation of texts, and international literary prizes). During the early twentieth century, Russian literature was the most favored among the many foreign literatures that East Asian intellectuals enthusiastically imported. Though we may find many reasons for this, one aspect of Russian literature that is often highlighted in its East Asian context is its social mission. Literature takes on a responsibility beyond its role as an aesthetic product in societies where the state strictly regulates political speech and activity. Incorporating Russia as an explanatory tool for East Asian literatures lets us understand East Asian intellectuals’ shared desire for a socially committed literature that would both critique the present and envision a different future. This shared aspiration does not emerge so readily when we examine the individual relations between Russia and one or another East Asian culture, or when we address East Asian literatures in relation to Western European and American literatures. This aspect of Russian and East Asian literary relations substantially and historically challenges the diffusion model of world literature and the perspective that sees literary works as being embedded in competitive relations among national literatures. Through a discussion of recent world literary theories with a focus on translation, circulation, literary prizes, and ethical approaches to world literature, this chapter argues that we are best served by thinking of world literature not as an entity that operates by inclusion and exclusion or as a single diffusion network defined by hierarchical and competitive relations but as a totality of entangled literary and cultural relations and processes through which new meanings and implications are generated. Rethinking world literature as a new lens, rather than merely as an object to know, also provides new perspectives that allow us to understand the world better through various literatures and their connections.

The inadequacies inherent in tracing literary history in purely national terms have been apparent ever since the emergence of national literature in the early nineteenth century: the problems caused by multilingual nations, authors, and texts; by multinational languages, and so on. If world literature is not merely to replicate the errors of national-literary analysis on a larger scale, then new geographies will be needed. Various options exist, from the “areas” of Area Studies (linked to a dubious model of “civilizational” contact and conflict), to “-spheres” and “-phones” (the Sinophone, the Anglosphere, etc.), to hemispheric and oceanic studies. Each of these approaches opens new perspectives – and creates new blind spots. I review an alternative model, which I have earlier proposed in my An Ecology of World Literature (Verso Books, 2015), which seeks instead to identify typological similarities between the “ecological” contexts in which literatures exist. These similarities are transhistoric and trans-continental, and while they do not provide a perfect substitute for geographically-based models in all circumstances, my ecological typology suggests new comparative possibilities for world literature.

The relationship between business activity and human rights in the context of intellectual property (IP) is unique. First, it is an example of how national efforts to control the human rights impact of business activities can be frustrated by international agreements. Thus, the obligation under the Guiding Principles for states to maintain sufficient national policy space to address human rights impacts is particularly important in this area. Corporations also have a responsibility not to push for changes in domestic and international law that would enable them to maximize profits at the expense of human rights. Second, the case of human rights and IP provides an example of corporations taking advantage of legal rules that allow them to extract profits at the expense of human rights. These legal rules are directed toward a legitimate purpose, but they can also be abused in ways that harm human rights. Thus, the relationship between IP and human rights demonstrates that corporations may have a responsibility not to take maximal advantage of opportunities to make a profit where doing so would violate human rights. It also indicates that human rights law may constrain states in the choices they make about how to incentivize innovation.