ABSTRACT

The global university system and the world-literary system (to use Pascale Casanova’s phrase) connect cities of the Global South both to each other and to the North. But these connections do not impose uniformity to Global South urbanism and its cultural expressions, not least because literary and academic-humanities worlds are articulated in tension to, as much as in harmony with, one another. This argument is made by examining Roberto Bolano’s The Savage Detectives (1998) and Amit Chaudhuri’s The Immortals (2009).