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.

This chapter addresses how Arabic, besides being the scriptural and liturgical language of Islam, came to be the lingua franca of a world empire and its literary heritage. The chapter is divided into two parts, with the first subdivided into three sections examining the professional and literary careers of three chancellery secretaries of the late Umayyad empire, namely, Sālim Abū-l-ʿAlāʾ, ʿAbd-al-Ḥamīd al-Kātib, and Ibn-al-Muqaffaʿ, who briefly also served the early ʿAbbāsid dynasty; and how their contributions, both of translations and original works, laid the foundations of Islamicate imperial culture and of adab literature—a new style of Arabic written prose which, by way of translation, was to become part of premodern world literature. The second part of the chapter provides a brief survey of the genres, subgenres, and audiences of the literatures of adab within the Arabic literary tradition of the Middle Ages.

In spite of their long history of contact, exchange, and dialogue, Chinese and Latin American cultures constitute a challenge for comparative, transregional, and world-literary thought. By drawing on examples of literary and cultural contact between these two cultures that emerge through a closer look at the 1965 novel Farabeuf by Mexican writer Salvador Elizondo, this chapter will diagnose some of the challenges of comparative, relational, and world-literary methods. It models a transregional critique as a multi-scalar, poly-comparative approach to thinking about shared literary and cultural worlds: as histories marked by Orientalist fantasies, networks of literary circulation, translation, and influence, as well as by the challenges of literary worlding in the face of global power dynamics.

This chapter addresses the dynamics of world literature from a postcolonial angle, integrating the role of the cultural industry in the dynamics of literature across borders. It focuses on the role of texts in reshaping cosmopolitan imaginaries, accounting for the tension between commercialization and the politics of resistance. In particular, the chapter addresses the role of digital technologies in articulating the worldliness of literature not just through circulation and reception but also through new narrative strategies and tropes that open up new scenarios for thinking and imagining migration beyond the limits of borders and geography. It takes as case studies Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah (2013), in which blogging is used as a form of advocacy, Hamid Mohsin’s Exit/West, which introduces the expedient of magic doors as portals to overcome the sense of stuckness of migration, and the poems of Warson Shire, who emerges as a prominent new Instapoet capable of cutting across audiences, generations and media platforms.

The essay examines the concept of regional literature with Scandinavia as an example. Advocating for regional literature as a promising working space between the too smooth space of globality and the overly strict confines of national literature, the essay suggest the archipelago as a concept that keeps the region open to the world and yet assembled, heterogenous and recognizable at the same time. After a discussion of the concept it is developed further by way of a reading of Swedish Nobel Prize-winner Tomas Tranströmer’s 1979 long poem Östersjöar (The Baltics). On the basis of the reading and with recourse to previous discussion the essay ends by suggesting six imperatives for working with regional literature.

Ideas, motifs, aesthetics, bodies of knowledge, texts, genres and literary worlds have travelled for centuries along Silk Road’s multiple networks of circulation connected through myriad contact hubs located across many temporal and spatial planes. This chapter argues that the Silk Road offers a roadmap for thinking about modes of circulation in world literature in ways that take us beyond the linear trajectory of West influencing the East, the centrifugal proliferation of the European novel around the world, the centripetal East coming to the West for a place, and the single temporality of the global visions of “modern” “colonial” and “postcolonial” “planetarity,” “globalization.” It offers two examples. The 1001 Nights is a classic example of the global circulation of a “text” beyond “translation-as-circulation” and the confines of monologically defined language, nation, genre and historical period. Coffee is a site of global connectedness and intercultural exchange in a comparative analysis of coffee in five literary works from Egypt, Japan, Palestine, Taiwan and Turkey. The global pasts of coffee give shape to the literary world and worldliness; however, each is uniquely mapped by the itinerary of coffee and the cultures it has picked up on the way.

Play development in the American regional theatre is a collaborative relationship between artistic directors, dramaturgs, literary managers, playwrights, directors, actors, and designers. Within this system artistic directors commission work and provide a “magic garden” where playwrights develop material from workshop through theatrical production; this is exemplified by Lauren Gunderson, who writes traditional plays appealing to America’s heartland; avant-garde director/playwrights Carey Perloff and Joanne Akalaitis, who develop challenging work from classic and contemporary sources; and Latinx playwright Elaine Romero, who has navigated this network for more than twenty years as a resident playwright. New York City is no longer the major incubator of new work; instead collaborative play development programs of regional theatre organizations as the Arena Stage, the American Conservatory Theatre, the Goodman Theatre, the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center, and Chicago Dramatists dominate. Despite the harsh economic realities faced by playwrights, the regional theatre culture of commissions, residencies, development, and foundation support provides salaries, health care, and benefits to artists.

This essay reads world literature’s most recent (of many) emergences in relation to the tensions created by late capitalist globalization. The latter are connected to a series of points, from Goethe’s early nineteenth-century concept of Weltliteratur to midcentury postwar reanimations of the concept and the field formation of the present. Practices of reading, models of time and space, and the shadow of spectrality are points of particular focus in this survey of major contributions to the field. The essay proposes that world literature after 1989 constitutes not only an era of history but also a particular kind of hermeneutic in which periodization can be reconsidered beyond Eurochronology.

Cognizant of the risks of oversimplification and unavoidable omissions, Carpenter’s essay introduces major movements and advances within the African American and Latinx American dramatic canons from the era of the civil rights movement to the present. Referring to select playwrights (Amiri Baraka, Luis Valdez, Adrienne Kennedy, Maria Irene Fornes, Lynn Nottage, and Quiara Alegría Hudes) as exemplars for this exploration, Carpenter offers a progressive build in this historical account, closing by focusing on the most contemporary of these dramatists. These celebrated artists are mere “tips of the iceberg”; they are highlighted here to inspire readers to pursue research and gain a greater sense of familiarity with the rich history and proliferating presence of racially and culturally diverse in American theatre. Carpenter reminds us that utilizing expressions such as “diversity and inclusion” will fall flat as trendy phrases unless theatre practitioners and scholars recognize and actively address the fact America’s network of regional theatre still has much to accomplish when it comes to actualizing commitments to equity.

This chapter highlights the importance of the incorporation of international standards into national laws establishing ECAs. With this aim in mind, the global architecture would benefit from enhancing the commitments made through international standards so that adhering states shall be compelled to pass legislation mandating ECAs to conduct human rights due diligence. Furthermore, stakeholders should be properly consulted. Most important, efficient enforcement mechanisms are needed to ensure that a formal complaint process enables stakeholders to challenge loans granted by ECAs on the basis of human rights and environmental violations.

The American avant-garde theatre of the post-World War II era, with its underlying engagement with the betterment of society and a foregrounding of the body, either solo or collective, could be seen as an extension of the Romantic project. But by the 1990s, the ideas and impulses that fueled its artistic drive seemed to dissipate as it became subsumed by Postmodernism and also by popular culture. The avant-garde energies and impulses did not disappear, however, and increasingly they could be found in the theatre’s eager adoption and exploration of new technologies and digital media. By mediatizing live performance, the new technologies often became co-equal with, or dominant over, the human actors. Beginning with groups and individual artists such as Squat, The Wooster Group, and Laurie Anderson and continuing through The Builders Association, Big Art Group, and Annie Dorsen, among many others, a post-avant-garde has emerged that does not fetishize technology, but rather embraces it as a tool to alter consciousness—much as the historical avant-garde did—and to expand the possibilities and definitions of performance.

With some fundamental changes taking place in the late twentieth and the early twenty-first century in an increasingly globalized world, especially the rapid growth of Asian economy and the rise of China, many of the old paradigms originated in the nineteenth century in social sciences and the humanities are losing their explanatory power and need to be modified and updated. Global history, for example, puts emphasis on the connectedness of the world from a broader perspective than the nineteenth-century norm of national histories, and world literature examines literary and cultural traditions far beyond the Eurocentric concentration and the Western canon. East Asia with its traditional Sinosphere and the Chinese scriptworld are getting more attention in recent scholarship as a regional cultural concept, which may offer some constructive ideas and insights into the multiplicity of cultural centers rather than the monolithic nucleus of a national model. This essay will discuss East Asia as a potential paradigm for the comparative study of literatures and cultures not just in East Asia, but for the idea of world literature as well.

Reporting is an essential instrument for organizations to understand the impacts of their decisions and operations on people and the planet. Addressing the most serious corporate impacts on sustainability by means of reporting effectively creates an accountability mechanism that helps organizations embed critical issues such as human rights into their business practices and at the core of their strategy. Through the means of reporting, organizations identify their sustainability risks and impacts and are encouraged to be accountable for them. Reporting contributes to internal awareness and understanding of possible negative impacts, as well as the means to mitigate them while maximizing the positives. This accessibility of information enables informed decision-making by stakeholders, including civil society, investors, customers and regulators. Consequently, businesses are more inclined to avoid or limit negative impacts and hence strive to improve performance. Ultimately, effective reporting plays an important role in a company’s success, as it responds to its stakeholders’ needs for transparency and information. This chapter presents an overview of the sustainability reporting process, draws lessons from current practices on human rights reporting, and provides recommendations for (future) practitioners, presenting a snapshot of current challenges and practical thinking.

Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s memoir, Guantánamo Diary, demonstrates the potential of testimonial memoir as a global genre to introduce new voices and geopolitical contexts into world literature. It is exemplary for showing how older traditions of testimony are being refashioned in an era of human rights, global English and memoir, to create new variations adapted to the contemporary world. At the same time, recognizing the material, linguistic and rhetorical conditions that have facilitated the publication and reception of Guantánamo Diary, and that have catapulted it to the New York Times bestseller list, should prompt questions about the limits that shape the form and reception of testimonial memoir today. In this chapter, I place Guantánamo Diary in a tradition of literary testimony including Holocaust testimony and Latin American testimonio, identifying resonances with these precursors. Through a close reading, I argue that Slahi’s distinctive style is characterized by opposing tendencies. On the one hand, his narrative is transnationally haunted by a global canon circulating through it, with sounds of Kakfa, Primo Levi, slave narrative and Mauritanian folktales. On the other hand, his English is miniaturized and Americanized. These tensions shadow a tension in the field of world literature. While some critics insist on studying literature in its original language, the linguistic, rhetorical and material conditions that propel a text such as Guantánamo Diary to the bestseller list suggest the ways in which ‘global English’ is naturalised as the language of world literature and of global testimony.

This chapter identifies the rise of a new paradigm of contracts within the modern global political economy: direct private contracts negotiated between companies and indigenous peoples (IPs) with a special socio-economic and cultural relationship to land.The above clause is taken from one such contract. These contracts are unique as IPs are one of the main negotiating parties and benefits for them are viewed as the main focus of negotiation. The contract cited above is special as it goes further than community development or social impact agreements, in order to translate indigenous rights to land by way of contract. These contracts effectively recognise indigenous rights on land and various forms of authority over said land, in addition, or in the absence of any formal title. They expose an emerging practice of formalizing free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) processes which may result (or not) in some procedural and substantive benefits for IPs. Consequently, we call this paradigm a contractualisation of indigenous land rights.

World literature dwells in our time and in times past. As a treasured heritage of artistic expression in oral, visual, and written forms, it is an indelible part of the story of evolution of human civilization. As a scholarly field, however, world literature has had a rather sporadic presence in the disciplinary landscape of modern universities, surging and receding in accordance with political and sociocultural transformations. The contemporary era is witnessing one such resurgence. The term world appears to have made a spectacular reentry as a literary critical rubric in the twenty-first century. One hears of the “world” all too frequently in academic circles, and in ways that mark our current global conjuncture as, perhaps, the most apposite moment for its articulation. One is reminded of Walter Benjamin’s phrase “the now of knowability” when certain historical periods offer just the right temporal traction for an idea to gain rhetorical currency.

This chapter is organized under two main sections. The first discusses how the content requirements of HRIAs are conflated with the ethical requirements of the assessment itself. This, narrow and inadequate species of HRIA ethics is quite different from the extensive body of legal ethics. The second section provides a case study of a World Bank-related impact assessment, which gives rise to legal and non-legal ethical issues and which is meant to demonstrate that the absence of concrete human rights-centred ethical guidelines in HRIAs can, even with the best of intentions, lead to outcomes that effectively violate fundamental rights.