MARIANO SISKIND is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He teaches nineteenth and twentieth century Latin American Literature with emphasis on its world literary relations, as well as the production of cosmopolitan discourses and processes of aesthetic globalization. He is the author of over two dozen academic essays and of Cosmopolitan Desires. Global Modernity and World Literature in Latin America (Northwestern University Press, 2014; translated and publish in Spanish as Deseos Cosmopolitas in 2016). He has edited Homi Bhabha’s Nuevas minorías, nuevos derechos. Notas sobre cosmopolitimos vernáculos (2013) and Poéticas de la distancia.Adentro y afuera de la literatura argentina (Norma, 2006) (together with Sylvia Molloy). His monograph, Latin American literature and World War I: Global modernism and cosmopolitan distance will be published later in 2018. He is working on a new book tentatively titled Post-global y no-cosmopolita: crisis y dislocaciones de eso que ya no es mundo.

Abstract:

The first stage of the latest return of world literature that took place during the past 15 or 20 years, organized around a phenomenology, a history and a sociology of global circulation, where the concepts of cultural difference and expressive national or regional representation and expressivity, has come to a close. My idea is that in order to move on to the next stage of our work with world literature, we need to understand the radical ways in which the world as a signifying structure was undone during the last few years: ecological crises, perpetual war and terror and the displacement of millions of refugees, Trump’s demented tele-isolationism, the crisis or death of Europe as a project of political and cultural reorientation of the American global hegemony, the consolidation of authoritarian governments in China, Russia and Turkey, invested in disrupting the functioning of liberal democracy locally and globally, and the radicalization of global financial capital’s autonomization since the recovery of the 2008 crisis. My paper will work with a number of fictions, works of visual arts and theoretical texts that work through the generalized experience of dispossession, destitution and disbelonging, of being lost in the world, the experience of being in mid-air right after the rug has been pulled from under our feet, and begin to trace the contours of the territorial formations where the world used to be.