ABSTRACT
I began this study with the claim, made by both Appadurai and García Canclini, that cultural producers’ modes of imagining neoliberal globalization are a constitutive part of this phenomenon of broad social transformation. If we are in the midst of a world-systemic sea change the magnitude of which has not occurred since the long Industrial Revolution – and I believe that we are – then this is some of the most pressing cultural work that can be undertaken, and the students that we work with (both undergraduate and graduate) would strongly benefit intellectually and civically from engaging with these imaginative formulations of the world that they inhabit and will shortly be joining the labor force of (if they haven’t already). Given that at the heart of the social transformations set in motion by neoliberal globalization are the various forms of geographic mobility bringing members of disparate world cultures into greater contact with each other, this exposure to the literature of globalization clearly needs to be transnational and multicultural in nature. This will necessitate a movement beyond the hegemony of Anglophone texts in English departments – yes, it would be better for Arabic or French texts to be read in their original languages, but for too long the notion that texts need be studied in their original languages has enabled a stark Anglophone provincialism within English departments. Yes, area studies and comparative literature programs should not be allowed to wither in the manner that college administrators and policymakers have been sanctioning for some time and yes, it is a continual national embarrassment that the lack of prioritization of second language acquisition means that very few U.S. college students have the linguistic aptitude to read and analyze foreign language texts during their undergraduate courses of study. However, without unduly “poaching” on the intellectual territory of these disciplines struggling for survival at many institutions, English departments need to work toward internationalizing their study of contemporary literature in the spirit that David Damrosch sets forth in What is World Literature?: of not losing sight of the very particular local cultural contexts out of which a texts arise, but attending to the text as part of a broader transnational literary discourse as well.
