Description:

The CENTER FOR GLOBAL CULTURE AND COMMUNICATION,
an interdisciplinary initiative of Northwestern University School of Communication,

presents:

"Globalizations, Global, and World: History, Literary Criticism, and Spaces of the Present"

featuring a keynote lecture from:

Aamir Mufti (UCLA)

and presentations by:

Johnathan Arac (English, University of Pittsburgh)
Tithi Bhattarcharya (History, Purdue)
Neilesh Bose (History, University of Victoria)
Tamara Chin (Comparative Literature, Brown)
Brian Edwards (English, Northwestern)
Harris Feinsod (English, Northwestern)
Mark Frost (History, University of Essex)
Dilip Gaonkar (Rhetoric and Public Culture, Northwestern)
Rebecca Johnson (English, Northwestern)
Rama Mantena (History, University of Illinois at Chicago)
Emily Marker (History, Rutgers-Camden)
John Pincince (History, Loyola)

Through a two-leg workshop to be held at Northwestern University in 2017 and at the University of Victoria in 2018, this collective will explore the links between recent iterations of global history and explorations of world and global literature. Those who traffic in concepts of "world literature" are frequently conducting their analysis with limited, or distant readings of historians who scale and debate the “global,” as a method, or as a point of empirical analysis within the historical discipline. Furthermore, many historians writing “global history” today frequently conduct their research without a detailed reading of the stakes offered by scholars of “world literature” and associated debates about terms such as “world,” “global,” and “comparative” within literary and cultural studies.

This workshop enables a broad conversation about the relationship between the concepts of globalization, global, and world in history as well as in literary and cultural criticism. What sort of world is understood when recent global history is placed in conversation with recent critical revisions of world literature? To what degree are these trajectories in history and literary criticism parallel, and to what degree do they converge? Finally, which methodological approaches may best invigorate a history and literary criticism for the present moment in which humanist scholarship of topics outside of Euro-American canonical texts, places, and cultures, is in deep crisis?