This article presents an original methodology of world literature that draws upon ecocritical thought to rescale and recenter literary networks. Working particularly to unsettle the center-periphery model of world systems theory, an ecocritical study of world literature turns to more-than-human scales and forces. It asks that we take our cues from world-shattering or world-shaping ecological events and work outward to track how these events influence cultural and literary life across national, regional, imperial, and even planetary boundaries. After proposing assemblage as a primary technique for conducting an event-based literary study, the article demonstrates this methodology in a culminating analysis of literary representations, through various genres and forms, of the 1883 Krakatoa volcanic eruption.

Publicly Available April 4, 2019

Transpacific Resonances and Affiliations in Leanne Dunic’s to Love the Coming End and Ruth Ozeki’s the Tale for the Time Being

Michelle O’Brien

Page range: 35-59

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Abstract

This article examines methods of tracing affiliations across transpacific critiques through a reading of Leanne Dunic’s To Love the Coming End and Ruth Ozeki’s The Tale for the Time Being . The article proposes that, rather than reproducing a nation-bound framing of the 2011 earthquake off the Pacific coast of Tōhoku that envisions it as a solely Japanese crisis, Dunic’s and Ozeki’s works explore what it would mean to read the earthquake and its aftermath as a transpacific event. It argues that these works facilitate new relations between national cultures and the global, suggesting that, by narrating the earthquake and recovering its transpacific resonances, both works recover and write transcultural links that are obscured in nation-bound narratives of events. By self-reflexively commenting on this process of creative forms of transpacific intimacy, Dunic’s and Ozeki’s works directly address the potential for literary narratives to implicate individuals from disparate nations in a global, historical, narrative of events

Publicly Available March 8, 2019

Exposure and Black Migrancy in Teju Cole

Nicholas Gamso

Page range: 60-79

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Abstract

Through a reading of Teju Cole’s novel Open City (2011), this article argues that the exposure of black migrants constitutes the principal organizing conceit of global literary culture and knowledge production. The novel’s protagonist, a Nigerian emigre named Julius, is faced with ceaseless scrutiny as he traverses urban spaces in the US, Europe, and West Africa, meeting other migrants. In staging Julius’ encounters with others, the novel allegorizes a structure of racialized subjection continuous with the modern history of western epistemology and glaringly present in the contemporary. Yet it also provides grounds for a recursive ethic of opacity, which Julius eagerly endorses. The article surveys critical studies of race, migration, infrastructure, and world literature, in addition to Cole’s writings on photography. The aim is not only to uncover the logics of racialization at play in the enactment of culture, but also to conceive of culture itself as a historical infrastructure of privation and control.

Open Access March 5, 2019

Failing States, Human (In)Security, and the American World Novel

David Watson

Page range: 80-101

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Abstract

As a growing number of contemporary American novelists take the world and its socio-cultural and geopolitical complexity as their subject matter, the contemporary novel’s form and sense of worldliness are shifting. Twenty-first century US fiction challenges normative models of the world proposed by theories of cosmopolitan relationality by projecting fragile worlds of strife and trauma, in which violence accompanies geopolitical turbulence. In these novels, discourses around human security—the everyday security needs of vulnerable populations—are increasingly prominent. Accordingly, contemporary US fiction often incorporates within its geopolitical imaginary such issues as human rights, humanitarian interventions, development, and how life is disabled by prejudice, civil war, scarcity, and health or other crises. In this essay, I range across a number of works by contemporary American novelists such as Dave Eggers, Jennifer Egan, Denis Johnson, Dana Spiotta, and Bob Shacochis in which state failures as well as human and geopolitical security concerns impact on the form given to the world by these novelists. In their novels, narratives concerning human security as well as threats to geopolitical stability produce transnational geographies in which global interconnections and circulation intensify feelings of insecurity.

February 27, 2019

Old and New Names. Afropolitanism, Failed-State Fiction and World Literature

Lorenzo Mari

Page range: 102-124

Abstract

Since its establishment more than a decade ago, the cultural and political debate on Afropolitanism has been characterized by several different positions. In particular, the Afropolitan opposition to any kind of essentialism (Eze 2014) has been counterweighed by the necessity of a connection to “knowable African communities, nations and traditions” (Gikandi 2011, 9). This debate has been reproducing a typical oscillation of postcolonial theory and criticism between the celebration of hybridity (Bhabha 1994) and the interpretation of postcolonial texts as “national allegories” (Jameson 1986). At the same time, Afropolitanism appears to be related to a more recent phenomenon, which has been defined as “national failure” in political analysis (Zartman 1995; Rotberg 2004) and “failed-state fiction” in literary criticism (Marx 2008). The latter sheds a different light on Afropolitanism, by showing its advantages and its limits both on a national and transnational level. In view of this, Afropolitan literature – including the paradigmatic works by Helon Habila (2002, 2007, 2010) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2006, 2013) here analyzed – appears to be based on the persistence of “old names,” or categories, in an uneven but fruitful coexistence with the “new” ones (Eze 2016).

April 5, 2019

More than Global? A Roundtable Discussion

Rob Wilson, Sandeep Banerjee, Frank Schulze-Engler, Zahi Zalloua, Ming Xie, Ranjan Ghosh

Page range: 125-158

Abstract

In 2016, Duke University press published a book-length dialogue between two leading literary and cultural critics, Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller, Thinking Literature Across Continents , which provides the starting point for this discussion forum. Particularly pertinent both for this forum and, more generally, special issue, in the fifth chapter of Thinking Literature Across Continents , Ghosh examines the possibilities of “more than global” as a lens through which to assess the possibilities not only of literary but of all thought processes. Here, five scholars – Rob Wilson, Sandeep Banerjee, Frank Schulze-Engler, Zahi Zalloua, and Ming Xie – meditate on the potential of Ghosh‘s “more than global” thesis. Finally, Ghosh responds to these meditations in the light of his ever-developing thesis.

Book Reviews

August 23, 2018

Maya Jasanoff: The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World

Katherine Isobel Baxter

Page range: 159-161

December 25, 2018

Ulf Hannerz and Andre Gingrich: Small Countries. Structures and Sensibilities

Book review

Gunnar Grendstad

Page range: 162-164

January 23, 2019

Dorothy L. Hodgson and Judith A. Byfield, eds.: Global Africa. Into the Twenty-First Century

Ulf Engel

Page range: 165-166

About this journal

Objective
Local, universal, world-historical, world-systemic, or global historiographies as well as work in sociology, anthropology and international relations have shed increasing light on the common history of humankind. Only comparatively recently, however, has human global self-awareness broken through the confines of scholarly specialization, and begun to enter the everyday popular life, action, psyche, imagination and consciousness on a mass, global scale. The step into space and the resultant view of the planet, the new computer and media technologies of mass communication, the global spread of multinational corporations and human rights, the unprecedented environmental changes and challenges, the promise and threat of nuclear power and explosions, all have led to the increasing self-experiencing of the globe as a “spaceship earth.”

The field of interest of New Global Studies (NGS) therefore is both multidisciplinary and global. New Global Studies interprets globalization with a historical and sociological angle as opposed to history or sociology with a global angle. The journal addresses the process going on around us as a whole, and developing over time. It addresses globalization with a holistic perspective, which gives us a view on the past and present of the globalizing phenomena that will be invaluable to all who seek to comprehend this fundamental aspect of our society and its development. Our focus is unabashedly on the new globalization that has manifested itself so vigorously in the period starting sometime after World War II. Starting from this relatively contemporary perspective, we are fully aware that there are deep roots in the past that must be explored. Nevertheless, and in contrast with most historical journals, our primary emphasis is on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Topics
We welcome articles on all aspects of globalization: economic, social, cultural, and political. In particular, we encourage analyses, both theoretical and empirical, of the following:

Transnational manifestations of culture, and cultural synthesis
Patterns and local effects of economic globalization
Elite and popular perceptions of, and reactions to, global change
Global institutions and organizations, both public and private
The global media, and the emergence of a "global society"
The degradation and preservation of the global environment
Global pedagogy

Article formats
Research articles, Review essays, Book reviews, Documentations, Commentaries