The debates about world literature tend to focus on the way literature moves in the world, the way it interacts with a world that is already “out there” relative to the actual content of the literary work. I focus here instead on the way that literature makes worlds, and on the ways that these processes of world-making point us towards a way of thinking about “world” literature that sees the latter term as an active participant in the construction of the former—or rather, in the construction of many types of the former term. The particular test case for investigation is the Chinese poetic genre known as the fu.

This chapter examines the main issues and achievements in the process of making MNEs human rights compliant. This involves, first, some understanding of the complexities of MNE organisation to highlight the problematic nature of attributing responsibility within what is a transnational network of interlocking entities linked either by ownership or contract or a mix of both. A distinction is made between integrated corporate group structures and looser transnational production and distribution networks between legally independent firms, often referred to as Global Value Chains (GVCs). Both have the capacity to violate human rights, but each has different control and accountability profiles.Secondly, the chapter will cover the main regulatory problems. These begin with the modalities of regulation. The UNGPs have stressed self-regulation through the corporate responsibility to respect human rights and the use of human rights due diligence (HRDD). MNEs operate as integrated enterprises, and GVCs as production and distribution networks, across national borders, while regulation remains bounded by the limits of sovereign state territory creating tension between the limits of national laws and the transnational nature of human rights claims against MNEs and GVC firms. The remainder of the chapter will cover substantive liability issues.

The hybrid name for Latin America is a clue to its double consciousness and, as a corollary, to its talent for exploring complexity. A push and pull between competing classical and local lineages among displaced and replaced peoples has brought curses on Latin America, but also the blessings of an unbidden freedom to invent new patterns. If bitterness haunts the deracination on a continental scale, irreverence lightens the burden. From colonial times through the current post-Boom period, Latin American literature has been a vehicle for cagey revenge against metropolitan conventions, and for re-membering aboriginal cultures. The legend of Inkari, for example, literally foretells how the body of the Inca emperor, dismembered by Spanish conquerors, will reassemble underground and emerge triumphant. Double consciousness in Latin America describes a culture of baroque anxiety and compensation for doubt about one’s place in the world. With Afro-Latin American literature, the ironies multiply exponentially. Architectural monuments to excess -- meant to overwhelm worries that followed from the discovery of sophisticated cultures that had no debts Europe – worries about the nature of God, the center of culture, one’s own identity -- are visible throughout the continent’s landscape. Local gods and African orishas adorn Catholic temples. Excess is audible too, in the complex strategies for addressing readers, starting from colonial times and reviving after interruptions of purposeful coherence and optimism. The great first masters of Latin American literature were baroque, practically by default as they navigated conflicting codes and overwhelmed the fault lines with clever structures. As pioneers of local style, they set the tone for future movements, through the taste for complexity waffled when political ambitions for independence or national consolidation triumphed through foundational fictions written by political leaders in order to win the hearts of newly minted citizens.  Compared to the skillful jousts with European conventions by baroque masters, nation builders and populists would seem naïve to the ironic novelists who ignited a Boom in Latin American literature and who brought European readers face to face with the structural contradictions of modern cultures.

This essay develops a literary history of the concept “world” in the early modern period, suggesting that particular literary strategies—speculation, scalar juxtaposition, allegory, philology, and lexical play—became integral to imagining, naming, and shaping a particular vision of “world” across a range of media. Through a comparative study of European and South Asian examples, it shows how worldmaking literature in the early modern period can be characterized by “cartographic poesis,” that is, an intent to shape and represent the idea “world,” to bring it into being as a coherent concept and category. It further explores words for “world” and their significations across a range of languages and cultural contexts, highlighting how literature may be a crucial resource for envisioning ideas of global totality.

This chapter revisits the nineteenth-century idea of Weltliteratur through colonial histories. It argues that world literature in the nineteenth century does not name a corpus, a space, or even a problem in literary history. It does not even refer to one single history or one singular event as the origin point for a planetary vision of literature. Rather, it directs one to the confluence of global histories that produced a modern idea of literature and some of the critical tools that constituted the new discipline of literary studies. The material condition for this confluence was provided by modern European empires and their meticulous arrangements for colonial governance, sustained through painstaking engagement with different linguistic and scribal traditions. This argument is fleshed out through close readings of the works of a host of colonial officials stationed in British India and their local interlocutors, and through their method of “colonial philology.” Colonial archives and philological methods, this paper suggests, provide one of the early genealogies of world literature as an idea.

What is the place of poetry in world literature? World literature has been defined as writing as gains in translation, but this model excludes poetry tied to the language in which it is written. Poetry has also been said to be untranslatable, but this opposing model can’t account for the aspects of poetry that survive and even thrive in translation. Exploring lyrics in Persian, German, Latin, French, and code-switching English, this chapter tests the “gains-in-translation” and “untranslatability” models against poetry’s language-specific and language-crossing affordances. Proposing a more nuanced position that allows for both losses and gains, it argues that world literature can only be adequate to poetry if it’s attentive to comparative literary specificity.

This chapter takes up a small part of the writings of a group of Muslim intellectuals from China who studied at Al-Azhar University in Cairo in the 1930s and 1940s and worked to think through the connections between China, Islam, the Arab world, and literatures in Chinese and Arabic. Through a close reading of Recollections of Childhood (Tongniande huiyi), Ma Junwu’s translation of the first volume of Taha Husayn’s The Days (al-Ayyām), we see how the Sino-Muslim Azharites provide a valuable historical example and theoretical resource for our own scholarly practice at a time when attempts to go beyond the boundaries of national literatures and languages default all too quickly to monolingual approaches.

This chapter considers what happens to the cartography of ‘world literature’ in times of mass migration and indefinite detention. It focuses on contemporary literature by and about refugees and asylum seekers, using the distinction between emic (written from the perspective of the subject) and etic (written from the perspective of the observer) narratives. It turns to representations of refugees in ‘hospitable’ narratives, such as graphic narrative and contemporary novels, and questions the ethics of recognition in humanitarian storytelling. In a case study of Behrouz Boochani’s autobiographical novel No Friend But the Mountains, a paperless text ‘thumbed’ by a Kurdish Iranian asylum seeker on a smartphone in Farsi at the remote detention centre on Manus Island, PNG, and translated by a transnational authorial assemblage of human and nonhuman agents, it considers how new technologies now transform the possibilities for a literature from the camps in the borderlands where refugees and asylum seekers are detained.

In this chapter, we first discuss the growing expectations for companies to address human rights and the need to develop business models that enable profits and human rights principles to co-exist. We then describe and discuss two empirical cases of companies that are experimenting with new business models to align the expectations for profits with the protection of human rights. The first case from the sportswear industry shows how Decathlon, a French sports retailer, has revised its purchasing practices to create partnerships with its suppliers with a view to improving both productivity and working conditions. The second case, from the extractives sector, discusses how Trafigura, a Swiss-based commodity trading company with headquarters in Singapore, has set up a collaborative project with a mining company to formalize the artisanal mining activities of cobalt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to mitigate human rights risks. Both cases illustrate actions taken by companies to embed human rights into their core activities while also developing their businesses. These cases provide anecdotal evidence for the hypothesis that systematically integrating respect for human rights can indeed go hand in hand with financial success and be considered ‘good business’.

This chapter makes a case for the persistent salience of the Jewish Holocaust in postcolonial cultural discourse and especially literary production. It adopts the term contrapuntal memory to describe these entanglements, and considers what figures of world and history this archive offers. It is organized into three sections. The first examines how the colonial ordering of the world globalized the Holocaust, and considers two novels about Jewish internment in the British colonies. The second concerns the role of Holocaust memory in postcolonial Europe, as a means for both the assimilation and exclusion of migrant and minoritarian subjects. The final section reconsiders 1945 as a temporal threshold and historical rupture, and examines how the Holocaust might be situated in relation to the longue durée of racial modernity.

This chapter explores the relationship between postcolonialism, diaspora, and world literature. Taking as a starting premise the complex nature of Jorge Luis Borges’s the Library of Babel as a starting point, it traces the shift in critical orientations between Commonwealth Literature to Postcolonial Literature, and looks at the significance of diaspora literary studies in providing new metaphors by which to look to think about circulation both in the library and in the world of population movements more generally. It is suggested the library of the republic of letters is enriched by viewing it as exemplifying these two distinctive modes.

This essay claims that “world literature” should be understood as a genre rather than as a canon of circulating texts. In this sense, “world literature” denotes writing that is written for and to the world in general, rather than for or to any particular community or readership. Franz Kafka’s writings exemplify this understanding of world literature, which was mediated by a particular moment in the history of philosophy—the moment when philosophy too became “worlded.” This essay considers three interconnected events of intellectual and literary history to advance this argument: 1) when the category “world literature” first appeared in England among a group of mid-eighteenth century Anglican clergymen called the Warburtonians; 2) Schopenhauer’s re-assemblage of Asian and European thought to produce a profoundly influential philosophy of the world; and 3) Kafka’s writings which belong to the Schopenhauerean aftermath, and which can be understood as a mode of literature which neither emerges from any particular literary/rhetorical lineage or tradition nor is directed towards or written in the interests of any knowable community or readership, but rather to and of the world itself.